Now that summer is here, we’re getting temperatures averaging around 90 degrees +. And although we’ve had some rain recently, the conditions are very dry. This means that the bin is starting to dry out fairly quickly.

I generally go out about once a day now to spray the bin with a bottle sprayer to keep things moist, but not too moist. Ahhh yes, it’s always about finding that perfect balance in moisture. Not too dry, and not so wet that they’ll drown.

I’m considering changing this website’s name to “Adventures in Desert Worm Composting.” !

We’re not even reaching the highest summer temps yet, so more challenges abound. We have the worm bin in the shadiest spot of the house, so we may actually move it indoors if it comes down to that.

We’ll see how it goes!

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Click on the video above to see how our worms are doing!

The worms seem very happy, especially that the cooler weather is gone for good. Summer has arrived, and with it, a few new challenges. Our worm bin was in a shady spot during the spring, but now the sun is starting to hit it during the late morning hours.

I noticed the materials inside were starting to dry out pretty quickly, especially around the edges. At first I just sprayed the compost material with a spray bottle every couple days. Now that our daily temperatures are averaging around 90 degrees, I went ahead and moved the bin to a spot that stays shady almost all day long. This helps, but I still have to use a spray bottle at least once a week to keep the material moist.

Another thing that’s happening is because of the low humidity, we’re not collecting much liquid from the bin. I think that’s also related to the fact that we’re probably around 20-30% capacity for our worms. I’m guessing we have around 400 worms in there, instead of the 2000 we started with.

Things we’re adding to the bin these days:

Old lettuce, corn cobs, corn husks, washed egg shells, moistened paper egg cartons, and coffee filters with coffee grounds.

I’m the only person who drinks coffee at home, so it’s a filter (unbleached) for a one-cup coffee maker.

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So, soon we decided that it was warm enough to put our worms outside in a shady spot in the yard.

We picked a place close to the kitchen and underneath some vines. They get a little sun in the afternoon but they seem ok for now.

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We solved our worm die off by getting our friend to give us about 300 red wiggler worms from his worm-composting box. I’ve discovered that it’s pretty easy to find people in your community who compost with worms if you ask around. The worms seem to be bounding back nicely. I know it will take a while to get the worms back up to 100%, but the worm bin is healthy again, so that makes me happy.

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I was surprised to find that drowning your worms is not all that uncommon. I talked to a woman at a gardening festival the other day that had done basically the same thing.

I also talked to a “Master Composter” who gave the following tips:

Use a bedding material of shredded news paper and peat moss. I asked if any sort of soil was even necessary and she said not really. She said she hadn’t had any problems with minimum temperatures in Albuquerque, which is in USDA gardening zone 7a I believe. She said that in most cases in this area, you can put the bin against a sunny wall during the winter and they should be ok. However, I’ve read in several sources that say not to let the temperature drop below 38 degree F or the worms will start to die off. This is why this winter we’re moving the worms to the garage or to a friend’s greenhouse.

The Master’s Composter also had an interesting tip: wash out egg shells and throw them in without crunching them up. She said that the shells actually provide a comfortable habitat for the baby worms to hang out and nest in.

She also said not to put too many fruit scraps in. This way you’ll avoid some of the issues with fruit flies.

Some things to note about worm farming based on our recent experiences:

It shouldn’t smell if things are working as they should. I noticed that indeed the bin started to smell a bit a couple days before our worms met with an untimely fate. The bin should smell just a little earthy or as much as a normal compost bin, slightly sweet.

Just make sure, if you do perceive a smell, check the conditions immediately!

I also recommend setting up a separate compost pail to collect kitchen scraps and let them partially decompose before adding them to the compost bin. Chopping up the pieces into tiny bits will also help. I’ve tried out putting the scraps in a blender and adding them to the worm bin that warm. That seems to work very well but again, be very attentive to the moisture levels in this case! This also takes some extra time, so it may not be practical for some people. We try and blend when we can, but if we can’t we simply cut up our compost material before adding it to the bin.

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Almost immediately we’ve found out that managing a worm farm is not as carefree at it may first appear. Caring for worms does indeed have a certain responsibility attached to it!

Here’s what happened. It was a bit cold outside still, with lows in the high 30s, so we decided to keep our worms indoors until things warmed up a bit.

So, after we first started the worm farm, I’d simply blend up some kitchen scraps, open the bin up once a week, empty out the blender, see how they were doing, and let it sit. I sprayed it a few times with a spray bottle for added moisture, just in case.

I read that if the bedding feels a little dry, then it you should mist it with water. Unfortunately, because we have a pretty hectic schedule, I wasn’t paying as close attention to the moisture levels as I should have been.

Well, it turns out that our bedding mix soaked up the water like crazy, and the fact that we left the worms in a closet in the bathroom turned out to add to the humidity with two people showering.

I also realized that with grinding up the food scraps in a blender to help with the decomposition process also adds lots of moisture. I would throw in the scraps, add a little water, and blend them up.

This in and of itself would have been plenty of moisture added to the bin. In fact, I spoke with a gardener who feels that the food scraps have all the moisture your worms really need.

So, after noticing that lots of worms were leaving the bin one night, I checked out the conditions. The bedding felt very wet and the worms weren’t all that active like when we started. I figured conditions were too wet so to compensate, I threw in more compost mix and gently stirred things up. Unfortunately, conditions were too moist already and the worms were in trouble. Within 48 hours, a lot of our worms were gone.

I felt like I’d failed my poor little red wigglers and vowed to take better care of the next batch. 

 (A note from two months later: Indeed, this was an important lesson and our worm farming experience has gotten better.)

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Today our new Australia-made Tumbleweed worm farm arrived in the mail. This will be a great supplement to our regular compost pile. We liked the idea of setting up a worm farm because you can place it outdoors in the summer and move it indoors in the winter. That way we can recycle our kitchen waste quickly and efficiently all year round.

We live in New Mexico where our compost doesn’t necessarily freeze hard in the winter. However, I understand that worm farming is very appealing to people where it stays very cold in the winter. Especially if it’s too cold to turn your compost bin.  If it’s cold out, you can set up a worm farm in the garage and compost all year long!

The Australian Worm Farm is pretty cool. It has two durable polypropylene boxes that stack one on top of the other. The top bin sits inside the lower bin and has a series of perforated holes in the bottom. The lid has several perforated breathing holes in it as well.

The bottom part functions as a container to catch the compost tea that drains from the top box. This compost tea is easy to collect and use in your garden as the worms go through the composting process.

The instructions for the worm bin describe how you can remove the top box and collect the liquid from the bottom.

An important part of the way this worm bin is set up is the fact that the lower worm bin has a drain spout. The idea is that you place the bin at a slight angle so that the liquid flows out into a separate cup or container. This is intended to prevent the liquid from getting too high and saturating the worms.

As I mentioned before, because of time and convenience, we decided to start composting with a prefab worm composting bin rather than build our own. The advantage of building your own is that you can adopt the size of the bin to the amount of waste you and your family produces. The City Farmer Website has some great information on how to calculate the square footage of surface area of a handmade worm farm per pound of food scraps.

So today we eagerly set up our worm bin and got to work feeding the worms. We decided to first place the worms indoors in a small closet space that we have in our bathroom. It’s next to the tub so we figured it would be a nice, cool, moist place.

That lasted about a week, and the worms found that they could escape in search of adventure. Some made it as far as the hallway, but most stuck around the bathroom and found a nasty fate on the bottom of a shoe during our haphazard and half-blind morning rituals. I actually read on the MUSC (Medical University of South Carolina) website that worms leaving the worm bin during the first few days of worm farming is pretty normal. They are getting used to their new environment and may tend to wander away from the bin.

We started off feeding our worms with a combination of coffee grinds, tea bags, egg shells, assorted vegetable bits and banana peels. We used materials that were already decomposing a bit from our compost bin, knowing that the worms actually eat the bacteria producing from the decomposition of the food scraps and not necessarily the food scraps themselves.

We followed the instructions and put several layers of wet newspaper down. We put a thin layer of organic soil mix on the bottom before dumping the worms on top. This mix was a well mixed batch of manure, wood chips, and soil.

We’re using plastic as the top layer as the instructions say that this is what works best.

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