How to Harvest Worm Castings from a Simple Worm Compost Bin

Hey guys, Deanna here with Homestead and Chill and I thought I would show you guys how we harvest worm castings from a really simple basic worm bin like this. So we already did a video, if you missed it, about how to set up a really basic worm compost bin just using a simple plastic tote like this. This actually isn't the one we're currently using though and not the one that you saw in that tutorial. We set up a new one because this is our old bin and it's funky and it has a big old crack in it and so it was time for a new bin and we downsized just a little bit as well but this bin actually still has quite a bit of worm castings and some worms in it and we wanted to get them out so I figured it was a perfect opportunity to show you how we harvest from this type of worm bin. It's a little different than some of those like stackable fancier worm bins that have different trays and layers for you because obviously it's just one big container so you have to sort of trick the worms in order to try to harvest as much of the worm castings as you can without bringing all your worms with you and so I should mention too if you are just starting with the new worm bin you might not be ready to harvest right away. It might take a few months for your population of worms to really like break down more of their bedding, break down their food, and actually start developing finished worm castings and don't worry I will rearrange the camera and everything and show you close-ups of all this but once it turns into nice round fluffy worm castings in a lot of the bed then that's time where you can start to think about harvesting some of it to use. So to do that, to prepare to do that, just a week or two before you want to start harvesting you have to feed the worms onto one side of the bin so if you normally have your bedding and food and everything all piled up also spread it out a little bit thinner so that there's an area that you'll be able to harvest from and then feed them and bury the food in one different area kind of in the far opposite corner for a couple weeks. All the worms are going to migrate to that side. Okay so then once you get most of the worms to migrate to the one side of the bin then it's a lot easier to harvest the finished castings from the other side of the bin but keep in mind that it's not a huge deal if a few of the worms end up coming along with you with your finished castings especially if you're just adding it straight to raised beds. We welcome worms in our raised beds and really it's sort of inevitable as well because their cocoons or their eggs come along with their castings a lot of the times and end up in your beds as well so those are going to hatch and develop little baby worms in your raised beds which are going to continue to aerate and break down organic matter and nourish your soil right in the beds so we'll try to leave as much behind as possible but that's okay if some get through. So to do that there's a couple different methods and I'll show you up close as well but a couple years ago Aaron made this screen and it was actually for a different project but it worked really perfectly for screening our worm castings. So this is just hardware cloth I think it's I can't remember if this is the quarter inch or the half inch size but it's hardware cloth on a random scrap wood frame and then it just has some wide head cabinet screws to keep it on here and it just happens to fit really perfectly over a simple tote like this and so that way we can just put the screen on top of a tote and then we're going to scoop some worm castings onto here and then sift it through and the screen accomplishes a couple things. A, it keeps behind large chunks of food that haven't broken down yet, any bedding like paper and things that need to go back into the worm bin you can sift them out and put them back and it should capture a bit of the worms. They might fit through some of the smaller ones through this size screen but you'll probably get the most of them. So you can kind of sift it through it catches all the big matter that needs to go back into the bin for further decomposition but it also helps kind of break down your worm castings into a nice fluffier more fine texture because it can get a little bit clumpy in there sometimes so then we end up with a really nice ready to spread ready to use screened worm castings this way. So that one other way that you can do it if you don't have a screen and what we actually did for years before so don't worry about setting up something fancy not that this is fancy but don't worry about setting up anything special if you don't have the ability to do at this moment we used to just feed them on the one side and then just scoop from the other side you know with a bucket and a little trowel and we'd scoop through and we collect the worm castings and then if there were big chunks I just picked through by hand and I just grabbed the worms and I grabbed the you know pieces of paper and everything and just threw it right back in there. So two simple ways the biggest thing is just getting them to go kind of away from the area that you want to harvest from so I'll go ahead and do some harvesting for you now. Okay so here is the inside of that worm bin we fed them over into this corner so let's actually see maybe I can see if we can see some worms here oh yep so Aaron gave him some apple and stuff I don't see a ton of them in here because again we actually took a bit of this population out already and put it in our other bin so I'm not seeing a ton oh there's a little cluster of them there they are they're down a little deeper I don't want to disturb them all right now but there are some of our worms hey buddies so we'll get that buried back up so that was kind of the little pile that we made so that we could harvest from this side so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to scoop a bunch into this bucket and then we'll bring it over onto the screen to screen it so getting through and you can see how fine nice and fluffy the worm castings are ready to be used and I'm not seeing a lot of worms in here so they've migrated the way that they're supposed to we're just going to scoop out a good amount yeah not seeing many worms at all right now and how much you harvest depends on the project that you're doing obviously so if you are really heavily amending a bed you might want to take a ton if you're just you know I mean and by a ton I mean you know however much you can spare from your bin but then if you're just say planting a tree or something like that and or a plant a single thing you know you might just want a nice little handful so you can periodically you don't have to it's a big pit of some sort you don't have to harvest huge amounts like this and screen huge amounts every time you need to use it we're getting rid of a good amount because we're actually going to make aerated compost tea which is a whole nother tutorial video that I'm going to prepare for you guys so we are harvesting a bit and again getting rid of this tote normally I probably wouldn't take even quite this much at a time I would just take a few scoops for whatever little project we're doing so it just depends on what you're what you need a little bit goes a long way though with worm castings so we've got the screen set up with a tote below so we can catch this stuff and I'm just going to do a little bit at a time pour some castings on here and just kind of sift it through and again this stuff's already pretty broken down we haven't been feeding this bed for that long you can wear gloves if you want to I'm not going to worry about it too much and just work that back and forth there are some sharp pits I think Aaron put some stone fruit pits or something in here all right so there's some big chunks some of this might even be like barky stuff from wood from the yard I'm not really sure so I don't even see any worms right now so we did a pretty good job about tricking them and getting them to go so I'm just going to push that kind of out of the side oh there's one worm one little guy made it through I'm gonna toss them back over there and do some more work that through nope sorry worm I do feel bad when they get kind of stuck on there so I'll just usually shove them through if they're stuck okay a couple big chunks apparently worms don't like cranberries we had a whole thing of um random plastic crap in there um we had a whole thing of cranberries in the freezer still from the holidays that needed to go so we put it in here and they have not eaten them okay so there are the chunks I'm gonna leave them be I'm in this and we'll just push that aside and check that out so this are all of our finished screen castings so it's as simple as that now we can take this amazing black gold natural fertilizer broken down organic matter really high in beneficial microbes it increases soil moisture retention and drainage just a great great natural fertilizer so again I'm going to make some compost tea with this so stay tuned in to that video and that'll be soon to come but you can also just add this straight to your garden beds you can even use it in potted plants there's a lot of different things that you can do with worm castings I'm going to write a blog post all about it as well so that's what this video is kind of to go with I should have mentioned that from the beginning so for more details um go ahead and tune into the blog post on homestead and chill thanks guys