Best worm bin plans?

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by Ludi, Jul 4, 2012.

  1. Ludi

    Ludi Junior Member

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    I'm looking at building a large worm bin, at least 100 gallons capacity. Does anyone here have a large worm bin design they especially like and can recommend?

    Thanks!
     
  2. S.O.P

    S.O.P Moderator

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    To save time and effort, 2 bathtubs?
     
  3. Ludi

    Ludi Junior Member

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    Thanks!
     
  4. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Hello Ludi, what are your plans for the worms? Composting or fishing? If you go too big too fast your worms wil spread out too much and your breeding will be slow. Keeping them confined to a smaller area till you get your numbers up is a better option. If you just want them for composting then any suitable container is fine. Like S.O.P. said bathtubs are great. He has one full of worms.

    Raising worms for fishing is a whole different ballgame. The worms to start with are different and here in Australia are about 10 times dearer than Red Wrigglers. You need to understand Worm Husbandry, set up a management plan and then cross your fingers and hope for the best. You need to strictly adhere to the management plans or your breeding will be disrupted and may stop. I see you are in Texas USA. The best person to buy your worms from is Bruce Galle in South Carolina https://www.orderworms.com/main.sc. Bruce also owns the Worm Expert Forum which I am a Mod. https://thewormexpert.com/. All of us there are still learning and are happy to share what knowledge we have.

    Good luck
     
  5. Ludi

    Ludi Junior Member

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    Thank you, Brian, for that helpful information. :) At this time I'm only looking at the worms for composting, with some being fed to fish and poultry.
     
  6. S.O.P

    S.O.P Moderator

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    2 bathtubs meet your size expectations, will probably save money on construction unless you get fancy with frame, will last, and should be easily found.

    I'm no expert with worming but my system has been very easy to manage, simple to harvest from (I'm currently trying a long harvest from one side now as opposed to digging it all out in one go) and issue-free.

    Here is a post I made on another site with a tad more info.
     
  7. Ludi

    Ludi Junior Member

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    Thank you SOP. :)
     
  8. andrew_k

    andrew_k Junior Member

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    I'm very interested in building the "Ben Hur Compost Seat" which was described to me in a PDC class. In essence, it's a octagonal "donut" (torus) structure, with 8 sections, divided by hardware screen to make 8 trapezoidal sections, with a lid on each.
    In the centre is soil with a lemon tree guild or similar, which will get huge quantities of nutrition from the worm farm encircling it. The Ben Hur name comes from the likeness to a chariot race, whereby you start with the worms in one section, putting all your scraps and some soil/compost in there until you're ready to move to the next section. Then you start filling the next section and the worms migrate through the hardware screen.

    This continues until you're back around again, by which time the first section has had plenty of time to rest and is in prime condition to be used on your garden, in your potting mix etc. Then the cycle starts again, only from now on you're using a full section of finished, rested EWC before migrating the army of worms to new home and food.

    The only reference I could find online to this is here https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s786367.htm , which seems to be either the original source or very close to it. If anyone has any more info on the Ben Hur compost seat, especially using one as a high-volume worm farm, please share! :)
     
  9. Ludi

    Ludi Junior Member

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    Wow, that sounds epic! "Ben Hur" indeed! Way beyond what I need at this point. Thank you for posting about it, really interesting design concept. :)
     
  10. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Ludi go with the bathtub or just some rubbermaid style of bins. This will give you all the worms you need. Keeping it simple means less work. I have a compost bin sitting on plastic on the ground. I keep horse manure in it and put my dog poo in there and cover it over. I do nothing else with it but the number of worms is amazing. The worms eat the dog poo and destroy the pathogens as it passes through their bodies. I cut and pasted below from a paper put out from a Canadian University.

    "More recently, Dr. Elaine Ingham has found in her research that worms living in pathogen-rich material, when dissected, show no evidence of pathogens beyond the first five millimeters of their gut. In other words, something inside the worm destroys the pathogens, leaving the castings pathogen-free"
     
  11. S.O.P

    S.O.P Moderator

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    He could also do what I'm thinking of and his first stage could be BSF during the warmer months, feeding their castings to the worms, harvesting larvae for the chickens.
     
  12. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    I had to go away and find out what you meant by BSF SOP! (Gottit now ... still haven't got a brain image of black soldier fly, but that's ok ... I'm sure I'll stumble across one closer to Summer ;) ).

    I also run bathtubs for composting/vermiculture. I gave away my last compost bin a year or two ago, and my reln worm farm is sitting, long since forgotten in a corner (anyone wants it, welcome to it ... it's one of those round, multie-tier jobs).

    Anyway, I stopped with the compost bins and the plastic worm farms ... because I don't like plastic (an oddity, it seems, of mine, in my local group). So I also don't do plastic shade liners over gravel (even tho I've instructed on this method ... hmmmm.), and nor do I cut into the bathtub.

    My method is to use a bit of the info from hugalculture methods, and the layering composting techniques, and rotational gardening. I have 3 tubs in use, with 1 in reserve, at most points in time.

    To start a "new" bathtub, I put a bit of fibreglass flywire over the hole and weigh it down with some stones (been using the same lot, over and over), then I put in sticks, logs, leaves, branches (any offcuts that take over a year to break down), to fill the bathtub up to at least a third. This is my drainage layer, in the same way that people build "ladders" out of timber and overlay that with mesh or wire ... same sort of concept, only cheaper ;)

    On top of that goes whatever grass, leaves, garden debris and bunny hay (with excrements) that I can gather together to layer (large layer of grass first, then alternating leaves/old hay/manure/debris. This layering I nearly fill to the top. Then I tip a large bucket full of the latest leachate from the preceding bathtub and pour it over the lot (microbial innoculation kinda thinking). I put a vermin resistant cover over this, but something that lets the rain in (usually a lot of old hardwood fence pailings, weighed down by volcanic rocks ... eventually I'll make something a bit more aesthetically pleasing for the interim lids.

    When this gets to a third from the top, I pour another bucket of leachate over it, bury a bucket of compost scraps into it, and add some worms just a little away from the scraps. And that becomes the "current" bin, and the fence pailings get relegated to the previous tub, and the lighter lids get moved to the "current" bathtub.

    On scraps, I ferment them slightly before adding them. Probably has a similar effect to freezing, in that it breaks them down a bit, but I like that they are readily accessible to the worms pretty quickly.

    Since adding char to my leachate buckets, I've noticed that the pH balance has settled, such that there are no vinegar fly's, and I don't need to add dolomite anymore.

    So, inputs are purely what I generate from my garden and kitchen (and from the bunny, who rather does like his lucerne ... one day I'll grow that too ;) )

    I know that if I were to be a purist worm-farmer, I would import manures, but ... ya know? I can't be bothered (actually, there's more to that, but that's a story for another day lol).

    What I'm saying is, bathtubs work very well, I've been using them for years, and wouldn't think about going back to composting bays or plastic worm farms.

    Mind you ... the ben-hur system looks a bit sweet (already thinking of "non-plastic" modifications btw).
     
  13. Ludi

    Ludi Junior Member

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    Excellent about the pathogens, thank you!
     
  14. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Well done cottager. Thats what it is all about recycling , doing it cheap and telling everybody else so we can all learn. I must confess that I use plastic out of necesity and practicality for my breeding and growing beds. Limited space also limits what I can do. I did have a bathtub where my daughter used to have her horse. I filled it with manure and put in about 1kg of worms. I took about 5 kgs back out of it over time. The area got flooded early year and the tub was under 2m of water for a couple of days. The water went down and it flooded again a day or two later to about 2m again. It was just too muddy to keep it going down there so I left it as is. The worms did survive the flooding ok. I would love to set up some big beds here at home but I don't think my Sweetie would be happy about it.
     
  15. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Any larve I find in my beds I throw in the pond with the turtle.
     

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