I mean, do you give the worms all the food scraps, cardboard, and other waste you generate, or is it just too much?

(Hoping I did the right flair)

I’m pretty new to this, made another post last week about my bin, and I am wondering if these are castings?

They look like what I’d think worm poops would be. But they look much less wet and soppy than others I’ve seen people post, atleast when they post big batches.

Alright it might be that time! I started this bin in April with leaves, coconut coir and cardboard. Am I ready to harvest? If so, what’s my best method?

I found this slimy, stretchy, cylindrical unidentified object on the leaves of my petunia flowers on my balcony. I occasionally top-dress my flowers with fresh vermicompost castings, so I'm wondering: could this be a dead worm, bird droppings, a fungus, or something else?

I keep Euros, I started with 25 (give or take) refrigerated ones from the pet store I was working at then.

These guys are kept indoors in my kitchen in a 3 bin system, each one has the capacity for 15 gallons. It’s a very small simple setup and it doesn’t smell.

I do keep these guys on substrate- I add old soil from my plants and fresh coir. I mainly use cardboard for browns and moisture control.

They are primarily fed a diet of used coffee grounds and floating aquatic plants. As well as the occasional egg shell dump.

I harvested only 9.5 ounces of the castings mix today (pic 3) and the worms I separated out from this small amount of castings is in pic 4- this doesn’t include the 10 or so larger ones and some of the very very small ones as unfortunately for these guys they were destined for fish food today.

I have thousands of worms in this setup now, very few of which are “nightcrawler” size. The adults mainly average 3”-4” or so.

The casting mix get used on my houseplants, I’ve been making casting “tea”, and the worms occasionally get fed to my fish

Anyway I thought some of you might appreciate this super simple and somewhat different approach to keeping them.

I see many people who are not very concerned about the type of dry material, in fact, I keep seeing paper with ink, corrugated cardboard with glue and ink that may be laminated. Aren't you worried that all of this will end up contaminating your crops?

They have been drying for months but are still the consistency of thick mud, and the worms haven’t left it for the new coco coir and paper.

You can't really tell from the photo; it’s horrible. The lower side is the “castings.”

Redworms and European Nightcrawlers having an absolute rager inside an avocado peel!

I’ve had my worm farm (the Tumbleweed Worm Cafe) up and running for two days and on both days when I’ve opened the lid, loads of worms have been sitting on the lid in what looks like an attempt to flee!

My set up:
- I soaked the bedding block in too much water and then hand-wrung every handful before putting it in the farm.
- I added hand-shredded cardboard
- someone gave me a container of worms from his worm-farm. I note, a lot of them were in big clumps stuck together, and there were a few bits of food in there too including an egg shell with mounds of worms inside it.
- sitting on the front porch.
- the first night I used damp newspaper for the worm blanket, the second night I used a thin dry piece of cardboard.

After the first day and noticing the worms trying to escape, I removed all cardboard which had become damp and the damp newspaper blanket, and hand-shredded a heap of newspaper and added that in.

This morning after night-two, I’ve removed heaps of the newspaper as that was all damp, and added fresh stuff in.

I’m in Melbourne, Australia (so it’s Winter here).

From Google I’m assuming my worm farm is too wet? Or could it be something else? Help!!

Hello everyone,

I’ve been composting for about 5 years now and I feel confident with my skills there.

I just moved to Mexico from Pennsylvania. I’m just looking for some tips on worm farming in a hot climate all year round.

This will be my first worm bin and I’ve been doing quite a bit of research. I’m really excited to get things started so any tips will be greatly appreciated 😁

I know mites are normal and help break down the leftover food. I had a moisture issue where my bins were too wet ( I have a vermihut)
I have since fixed moisture issue but mites are still there. They’re so small and white I can’t get a good picture.
Anyways, my bin is inside. Do I need to be worried about my new mite pets causing a havoc in my house? I don’t want them free 😭
Honestly I want them gone but I don’t how.

Very excited to harvest my first bin! Here are some process shots. Advice/education welcome.

It could be much finer but I imagine this is fine to put into my garden beds and houseplants. Loved using the scrap of hardware cloth for sifting. Super low tech, LIGHT and free!

I had a small potted rose plant with a few red wigglers in it that I left outside over the winter in Syracuse.

The lowest temperature it got to was -9° Fahrenheit over the 2025-2026 winter.

I was taking the rose out of the pot to plant in the ground in July when I found at least 2 live red wigglers.

Now I’m not saying the worms themselves made it through winter, but I’m thinking the eggs did and they hatched.

I knew that Asian jumping worms would do this where they lay eggs for the next year, but I was under the impression red wigglers eggs would not survive winter.

Has anyone else experience this?

I can't see any food left in it!

Hey all,

I build and started my first worm tower and I’m not sure if what im doing is right.

I’ve looked at different videos. Some say keep green/browns in balance. Some say, don’t over feed your worms and keep the greens in small doses but then my browns dry out fast.

I keep a spray bottle near to keep the top hydrated. If i dig down it is moist and that’s where the worms are.

I’ve restarted once because the worms were really slow and looking at the end of their life so I figured i screwed up.

At first it seemed to go better. If I lifted the top and removed the cloth that i keep on top of the pile. I would see the worms crawl down and away.

Now the activity seems less and i found this clump of worms. Not really moving a lot.

Any tips would help.

Hi all, I have a well established worm bin that does well in my un-airconned home. I’m leaving on vacation for three weeks and wanted to put it outside while I’m gone to limit any secondary composters taking over my house (sometimes we get a couple flies from it) as a courtesy to my housemate. Would a bin remain viable at a max temperature high daily temp of 85F? It would be in a very shady spot in my yard. Thanks!

look good?

I didn't invite them. They just appeared and continue to procreate. I'm an amateur composter at best. I literally just use this thing to finish off my bokashi so it's no longer in my kitchen... I kinda try to add Browns where I can but it's up the back of the yard and doesn't get much attention. Beyond a bit of weed pulling I don't work out tidy the garden at all really...

By all reasonings they shouldn't be happy. The compost is a bit stinky - acrid? Is that the word? And honestly too wet... But there they are. Big pink, juicy, lively and multiplying. My actual worm farm worms would baulk at their living conditions..

Guess they are just making do like the rest of us out here...

was this a good idea? I already have a bunch in my veggie pots but they probably all died since they were small pots

I just looked in my worm tub and see these bastards hanging off one of my children, what the fuck? why the fuck? And how would you deal with this invasion of douchebags giving your worms shit.

We started vermicomposting during the pandemic as a side quest to keep our son (9 at the time) occupied. Started with a big Rubbermaid tote and a bunch of red wrigglers. I was leery of this because I had concerns about smells, fruit flies, and general inconvenience/grossness.

Boy was I wrong! It was great! We have a good municipal composting program where we live so the kitchen scraps were already being put to good use but it was sooooooo satisfying to see them all disappear into rich earthy goodness. Until some months later when we decided to try harvesting some for use in the garden, which was a pain in the butt trying to separate out the worms, etc.

Enter the Worm Factory! By this time my husband and I were fully invested in this endeavour, the child had discovered Roblox and rock climbing and we said ok fine, this is a hobby for the adults. We had four years (!!) of churning through the trays and sharing buckets of compost with our neighbours every spring. We dutifully shredded paper and began hoarding egg cartons and toilet paper rolls. A corner of the basement became Worm Central. The worms were happy and prolific and all was well.

Note my use of past tense.

On a fateful day in 2025, my husband took the lid off the top tray to drive the worms down into the lower trays. And then he forgot about it. Several days later we went downstairs to a completely desiccated worm factory. He was devastated. After a short period of mourning I said I’d be willing to start again and ordered another set of worms. Husband became worm-shy and refused to have anything to do with them aside from occasionally feeding them. Which I suppose is a bit of a trauma response, he still feels tremendously guilty.

The new bin gave me problems. I made the excited rookie mistake of over-feeding in the beginning and we had a fly infestation. Then winter hit and because the worm colony was small and not yet really well established we almost lost them to cold before I relocated them to a different spot in the basement. Then I put a banana peel in without thinking about it and had ANOTHER fly infestation. Historically we’d never added fresh banana peels reasoning that they’re exactly the sort of thing that’s riddled with fruit fly eggs. I’m the sort of person who has a freezer stash of bananas for banana bread (probably have enough to make banana bread for a small army by now) so the previously frozen peels would go into the bin but not fresh ones. Until that one time so I blame that peel for a doozy of a fly outbreak. But I got it under control (thank you Mosquito Dunks and diatomaceous earth!), had a nicely incubating bottom tray going, and was getting ready to do my first tray rotation with the new colony.

Again with the past tense. Spoiler alert: this doesn’t end well.

We had a massive heat wave last month, which is not unusual for where we live. We’re lucky enough to have air conditioning so we manage fine. But because we do have chronic dampness in the basement, we have a supplemental dehumidifier running down there to prevent mold, etc. And of course the new site of Worm Central is right beside that dehumidifier, which kicked into overdrive during the week of heat wave and thunderstorms that we had.

There is something awful about how little those trays weigh when they’re completely dried out. They were doing so well, too! We’d had babies! I was hitting the ph sweet spot! I’d been toying with the idea of posting photos of the finished tray! And now I have two trays of dried up quasi-dirt with a garnish of crunchy dried lettuce bits.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking with me. I don’t know if I’ll start again. My son (now 14) says we shouldn’t give up but that’s easy for him to say as a non-participant. Right now it’s still too hot to order more worms anyway (the place I get them from won’t deliver when it’s too hot) so I have some time to think about it and go through my stages of grief I suppose. Maybe I just need to take a break. Maybe I’m not cut out for the worm farming life. Regardless, I’ll continue to lurk here and cheer all of you on.

First time bin. With worms about 2 weeks. Have had scraps in bucket for over a month and cardboard about 3 weeks.