Feeding your worms for harvest

August 11, 2023

You have started a worm bin, congratulation you are now a worm farmer. The goal is to harvest the best worm casting.

It takes about 3 month for a standard bin to get ready. Until there you need to think of a strategy for feeding the bin. There is two ways you can feed your worms. The horizontal feeding or the edge method and the vertical feeding.

The edge method.

This method is simple dispose the food only on one side of the bin and let the worms consume it. Then repeat on the other side. It is best if you have to harvest your bin from the top.

The way I proceed here is simple I make a trench on one side of the bin, I wrap the food in a paper that I soak with water. Then in burry the wrap and cover it.

The big pro of doing this is that the food is never on top of the bin and it will attract less flies and unwanted visitor into the bin.

The next big pro of this is that the worms will migrate inside the bin where the food is. The other side will have less worms and you will have less worms to sort from the casting where there is no food.

It does not reduce the time to create the casting but it facilitate the maintenance of your bin. You will have to deal with less troubles.

The vertical method.

The vertical method is best if you have to harvest your bin from the bottom.

All you do is layer the food on top of the bin wait that it is consumed and repeat. When you will be ready to harvest your worms will be feeding on top and you will have less worms in the bottom.

Why I like this method is that you can reduce the time to harvest. Especially if you give pre-composted food your worms will be super active on top of the bin and visible when you open it.

I can have a bin ready in a month and a half if I use well-cured compost as a bedding.

Compost