We have just finished building our biggest ever red worm bin. It was designed to fit on a pallet for easy moving around our space. We are thinking this red worm bin will hold up to about 50 pounds of red worms if we can feed them well enough. The earth worm castings produced will help supplement our high demand for premium organic earth worm castings this spring. The bin was built to hold over 800 pounds of earth worm castings at capacity.

• About 4 feet by 4 feet opening for a total of 16 square feet of surface area.
• Started with about 10 pounds of red wiggler worms
• Used this 1/4 inch galvanized wire rope for bottom section of flow through
• 2.5 inches between each 1/4 inch wire will allow regular flow of earth worm castings
• Painted inside wood with oil based white paint, second coat was added after this picture.

Check out our worm castings or red worms.

Feeding of 60lb of tea and scraps on May 14th 2011. Red worms are doing good work and we have bonus plants coming out of the side of the Compost-Air.

Check out our 130 gallon compost-air or 80 gallon compost-air

My goal was to build a worm harvester that would work on a small scale commercial operation. I need an efficient harvester that will be able to separate my worm material into three separate piles at the same time…the worms, cocoons, and castings. I decided to design and build my own rotating worm harvester. Almost all my materials were bought from hardware stores such as Lowes or Home Depot.

This harvester has two different size screens; 1/4 inch and 1/8 inch. These will separate the material into three piles. The1/4 inch screen will separate out the worms and anything else that is bigger than 1/4 inch. The cocoons (worm “eggs”) and castings will fall through the first screen onto the second screen which is 1/8 inch. This screen will keep all the cocoons and let the castings fall out the bottom of the harvester where they are collected in Rubbermaid bins. Anything that remains in the two screens will come out the end of the harvester and collect in two separate bins.

(Looking down the harvester from beginning to end. Handle used to spin the harvester on the two mounted ball bearings.)

(End of harvester with collection bins. The base of the end is on a swivel so I can easily change the angle of the harvester to achieve the most efficient harvest.)

(Bin on right collects anything bigger than the 1/4 inch screen which is all the worms and some chunks of uneaten bedding. The bin on the left collects anything that is smaller than the 1/4 inch screen but still larger than 1/8 inch which would mainly be the worm cocoons.)

Thanks for checking out my harvester. I will be adding a video soon…

If you are interested in more in depth info on anything feel free to post your questions or comments.

Since the last update the material has settled down about 8 inches. First image is after digging down 6 inches to find the red worms doing work. Second image is after adding about 25 gallons or 100 lb. of donated food waste provided by Cambridge Tea House.

Check out our 130 gallon compost-air or 80 gallon compost-air

We will be featuring:

• Live demo of Actively Aerated Compost Tea brewing throughout the day
• Hands on with red worms
• Introduction of new Full of Life red worm composting environment - 1 lb. red worm sets will be available for purchase.
• Columbus Ohio earthworm castings

Check out our worm castings

Check out more about the Earth Day Fair at: yesmuskingum.org

I feed my bin with 10 gallons of half processed VC loaded with red worm cocoons on top of last vegetable waste feed. On top of the cocoons 20 gallons of loose leaf tea, watermelon and other random tea shop veggies was tossed in the top. The bin is about as full as I am going to let it go so I will update next Thursday to see how quickly the food has dropped.

Check out our 130 gallon compost-air or 80 gallon compost-air

This flow through worm bin is made from a 132 gallon Compost-Air, an aluminum grate base and 8 cinderblocks. Since I started this bin half full of donated loose leaf tea and other restaurant waste the bin was stocked with 8lb. red worms. This Compost-Air has half inch holes punched through the sides, no lid and a flow through bottom surface. The high air flow creates a perfect aerobic composting environment which leads excellent breeding and earthworm castings production by red worms.

Worm stocking densities are below:

• 0.5 lb/square foot density is 17 lb. of composting worms
• 1.0 lb/square foot density is 37 lb. of composting worms
• 2.0 lb/square foot density is 74 lb. of composting worms

Check out our 130 gallon compost-air or 80 gallon compost-air ]]> http://www.rootnaturally.com/projects/132-gallon-compost-air-flow-through-worm-bin/feed/ 0 http://www.rootnaturally.com/projects/5-gallon-aact-compost-tea-brewer/ http://www.rootnaturally.com/projects/5-gallon-aact-compost-tea-brewer/#comments Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:01:34 +0000 Ben Buschmann http://rootnaturally.com/projects/?p=33
Bruce Deuley’s 5 gallon compost tea brewer instructions (PDF)

Check out our worm castings to make your own compost tea

The upper 5 gallon bucket has 1.5 inch gaps cut directly out of the bottom with a Dremel 300. Food scraps flow from the top then out through the newly cut bottom. The second bucket holds the nested upper bucket to catch castings and liquid. The cutout of the lower bucket has a 1 inch lip, enough to hold a small lake of liquid.