These are red wiggler worms, and here I show the difference between baby, juvenile, and adult worms. All are fantastic eaters and will make worm castings, but adult worms are the once that can make cocoons.

Tomorrow, Monday at 12 noon, we will have our first “office hours.” Anyone is welcome, but no pressure! I’m wanting to record and have the replays for anyone who can’t make it live. No questions are dumb questions, and I’m excited to all learn from each other. Hope to see anyone there who wants to learn a little more about these wormies!

I want to use SMS. I want the fungal microbes in with the rest so I have more complete and varied castings. But I've noticed a couple things. 1) When I hand broke the blocks up into small chunks, they tend to compress. The worms end up on the bottom of the bin and the moisture control is dicey. 2) There seemed to be very little casting production. 3) It tends to soak up water and make moisture control an issue. I had already decided not to use an SMS only bedding that I was going to run as an experiment due to these issues. Then I saw a reel from the Aussie Worm Cartel and he says his pre-composted SMS makes the worms go coo-coo for Coco Puffs! So now, I'm going to experiment with pre-composting it. Right now I'm doing it with shredded cardboard and coffee grounds. BUT - I'm using my poultry chopper to make it into a very fine mix. This time I added water to it after I mixed the ingredients. Next I'll try soaking the SMS before hand and then drying it down to a proper moisture level. After that, I'm going to see if there's a way to pre-compost just SMS without the cardboard. So I'm not done with it, just have to find the right mix and use for it. Anyone else have differing or similar experiences?

Wanna go full out organic? Daylilys may be the best flower to grow. In the basket are yesterday's spent blooms, the worms LOVE LOVE LOVE em!!! They're partially broken down(slimy and wet) and its basically instantly available food to them thats very nutritious. The stack of sticks are the dried bloom stalks from daylilys. About 2 weeks after blooming the stalks dry up and can be pulled out easily, chopped up(must be quite small and fine, they are fibrous and woody) and are a great carbon source for making precompost (research says anyways). I will finish drying them in the sun then chop em in a barrel with the wead eater to get them as small as possible. The daylilys also grow green blades that can be chopped fresh(again small and fine) to make a good nitrogen source(I'm skipping this part, they are best harvested in spring when smaller and fresh), I will be using an organic seed meal nitrogen source when I make this precompost. Will continue to post details on this experiment in the future. 😁🪱💩😁

I have a worm tower with trays and my older tray is mostly castings very few bedding left. I added another tray and added food to the new tray thinking the worms would migrate up. Most of them have migrated up to feed which is great but it seems like there are still a good number of worms in the older tray. It is mostly castings and quite moist and i think they may be breeding there. I have only seen one cocoon but ive seen many juvenile worms when i fluff it up. My question is do i leave that tray alone and the worms will just all migrate up when they are done breeding? I fluff it once a week to keep it aerated. I have stopped adding any food to this tray because i want to collect the castings but the worms wont leave it. Any advice is welcome and thank you!