Worm Digest - Re:looking to set up large worm bin

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markevens
User

A Fertile Cocoon

Posts: 2

looking to set up large worm bin - 2008/05/03 20:44 Hello,

I'm looking to set up a somewhat large scale worm bin. I live in a Buddhist monastery and are trying to grow as much food as we can for ourselves. We have around 15 acres of land we are farming and are expanding.

We get a lot of food scraps from the kitchen, probably a dozen 5 gallon buckets a day. We also are letting the local tree trimming companies dump their chips here, which I shred into fine mulch. We also get around 50 lbs of coffee grounds from the local coffee shops each day.

Right now we do a lot of sheet composting, but we can't really take advantage of the food scraps because they are so wet they clog the composter, even though it is PTO powered.

I recently have been reading about worm composting and am really excited about implementing a large scale system, but have no idea where to begin.

A friend of mine used to run the CCAT recycling program at Humboldt State University, which has a large EPM Inc. WormWigWam. As those run in the thousands of dollars, I don't think we can afford one, but building one is certainly an option.

Do you have any suggestions. Good information resources are appreciated too.

Thanks

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CharlieLittle
User

A Hatchling Earthworm

Posts: 16

Re:looking to set up large worm bin - 2008/05/03 20:57 Congratulations! I say that because you have such great resources to work with, many would be envious of!

With that large amount of fresh organics I would first consider the Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) for breakdown of the fresh components faster than any other type of composting and feeding your earthworms on the casting produced by the BSFL.

If you desire research material on the BSFL my blog link in my signature lists several. BSFLcomposting.com

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fourmares
User

A Protected Species Earthworm

Posts: 125

Re:looking to set up large worm bin - 2008/05/05 01:24 Wow, you're dealing with 100 - 200 lbs of waste per day... that would require 200 - 400 lbs of worms or more. I know that the Chinese are going to use worms to process all the horse manure from the Olympic games, so there is bound to be research available. Hopefully someone will post the article about using windrows for worm composting. I know that you can go up to 4ft deep. I think creating a bin that is somewhat circular and adding to one end and removing castings from the other (starting) end might work on a large scale.

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markevens
User

A Fertile Cocoon

Posts: 2

Re:looking to set up large worm bin - 2008/05/05 12:51 I think we are going to try and build our own EPM style composted like in the link above.

We can build the housing no problem. But is seems they use an electric motor to power a forced ventilation system and a mechanical grate. We would probably have to buy these parts retail but I don't know where I could find them.

@charlielittle, I'll check out your blog, thanks for the info.

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WFike

User

A Protected Species Earthworm

Posts: 223

Re:looking to set up large worm bin - 2008/05/05 21:32 You can just make a large bin out of corragated tin like a small swimming pool about 3 ft. deep and 10 or 12 ft across. Put in some worms and slowly fill with food. Once you have an abundant supply of worms and the bin gets full just start another and let that one age for a while hatching off all the new worms. Keep it covered and the worms will stay around the top. You can start taking off the top layer of food with tons of worms and start another bin right beside that one. Just keep taking out worms off of the top and transplanting them into the new bed as they hatch off. The second one will go much quicker than the first with all the new worms from both beds working. The first one may take a year if you don't have many worms to start with. Once they get going you will be amazed at their reproduction rates. After the first one is done and you have hatched off all of the worms and removed them to new beds just dig it all out and start over.

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