Worm food prep...
Today I want to talk about my food prep for my worm bins. I feed my worm bins twice a week. First feeding is a week old partially composted mixture. This week I will be adding two five gallon buckets of veggie scraps, one five gallon bucket of coffee grounds, two bags of fresh cut grass and one bucket of rinsed rabbit manure. The manure is added or not based on how strong or weak my feed stock is that week but is always rinsed well.
I add all this into my Jora hot composter tumbler. Give it a few good spins to get a nice mix and that is it. Every other day or so I will spin it to keep the feed stock mixed well. It will get very hot and I leave the feed stock in the hot composter for a week before the next feeding.
This is the before and after feedstock. As you see you will lose around 50% from all the liquid seeping out.
The main benefit of this for me is I live where it can get very hot and this helps get the feedstock threw some of the heat cycle so my bins don't overheat. It also allows all the liquid to seep out of the composter and not in my worm bins. The second feeding every week is just shredded wet boxes. As long as they are wet enough the worms will consume them and seem to enjoy being in the cooler wet shredded boxes when the temperature starts to peak.
I hope this is helpful for everyone. How do you prefer to feed your worms?
Very proper, man! Do you run your EWC through the lab when it's finished? Kinda curious what NPK and more you get from that mix.
I have sent some off for testing. I will get curious and do this when I change around my feed stock. I will do little at home testing for NPK and it is always in the excess amounts. Next one I drop off at the extension off I will post up. I add a lot of different meals like kelp meal, frass, bat guano, alfalfa meal, bio char, etc into my worm tea. I will get a nice mixture when I brew my worm teas and after brewing I add that mixture back to my bins by top feeding it. This will also help with producing really good quality castings. I also sift to 1/12th screens instead of 1/8th so I run a good amount of castings threw the bins twice. I will post up an article with results when I can. If you have Facebook you can follow me on my business page also since I post stuff there a lot also.
Staying off FB as much as I can... I'm a dead person there by now probably :D But I'm gonna check your posts here!
What is the purpose of rinsing the rabbit manure?
Gets the urine off of any of the hay or manure. The urine is high in ammonia and very bad for you worms. That is why it is best to just pile and age manure but a good rinse works also.
Good to know! I love all the bits of information I learn on Steemit!
Very cool. I had a bin here in Canada and I buried some in my tomatoe patch 2 summers ago. They survived that winter because we had a ton of snow(good insulation) I dug some up in the spring and they were thriving! This winter I will not be so lucky :( -30 temps and hardly any snow. You're lucky to live where it's warm.
It is better for winter but the summer can be brutally hot on the worm bins burying ice jugs and fans. I do still run heater in my bins in the winter but mainly to keep the temps more idea so they are working 24/7