Harvesting the Worm Castings

Unlike today which is miserable, yesterday was bright and sunny, nice and warm. There was also a good, stalwart breeze keeping the skeeters and blackflies at bay. So I naturally wanted to go out and weed the veggie garden. Since I was going to be outside anyway, I figured I might as well harvest castings from the second worm bin, I did the first, larger bin a while back just when I started planting. I like to be outside when the bin is out because I don't particularly want the crows to think I have just set up a buffet for them.

Harvesting the castings is getting easier. Probably because I don't sift it anymore. If it is half decayed and/or not moving, I take it. I don't care if there's a leaf or a little leftover straw stalk in the castings. So it's not the major time consuming chore it once was. The set up is easy. I put down a plastic sheet, gently dump the bin out. Rinse the bin out well and get the new bedding of dead leaves soaking in water, that would be the white pail in the top picture. Worms hate the daylight and will burrow down away from the sun. So I go weed for a bit, return and take the casings until I hit the worms, go back to weeding, and repeat.

As I go down into the pile, I will come across a clump of leaf bedding not eaten. I generally don't feed my worms for a few days before harvesting so they will eating the bedding but there's always a few clumps still hanging around. The clumps go back into the bin for one very important reason. Those little yellow, orange and white balls you see on the bedding are worm cocoons. Each will hold anywhere from 2 to 20 baby worms. I don't know why they're different colours and sizes unless they're from different types of worms or, and this thought seems to make more sense, because they are in different stages of development

So after an hour or so, the castings are pretty much all collected. Now comes the grody part. I am left with a pile of eewy worms and I am not going to pick them up, gloves or no gloves. Ugh. That's were the plastic sheet comes in so handy. Not only does it keep the worms from burrowing into the ground and escaping, it makes the perfect transport vehicle for the worms. I just pick up the corners and gently slide the worms and all their gooeyness into the new cleaned bin. Easy peasy, thank you very much. I rinse off the plastic and it's ready to use when it is time again to harvest.





Here's the nice, clean bin all ready for the most productive inhabitants of the DaM Farm. After soaking the leaves for awhile, I'll wring them out as much as I can and put a good 6 inches in the bin, that's the bedding for the worms. Then I will put in some soaked and drained rabbit manure. It gets finished off with another layer of leaves. One of the things about harvesting in the sun is I'm sure the leaves won't be too wet. The sun evaporates any extra moisture without drying out the leaves too much. Well, as long as I keep an eye on things, that's how it works.

And so is all this worth it? The hauling, the prep work, the back and forth, the great big squirm of worms? I think so, most definitely. Because this is what I end up with... a great big bag of worm castings (I have my foot in there for scale, the bag is bigger than it looks). It might just look like a bag of earth to you but it since I've been using it, my garden has just exploded with produce! The more we can grow ourselves, the happier the whole family is.