Here's an update on my vermicomposting experiments.
First some background: there's a book by Bruce Galle called 14 Day Worm Castings that is a pretty simple to follow guide to setting up your own worm casting business. It involves using African night crawlers instead of the traditional red wigglers, along with bedding of black peat and feed that includes chicken mash, worm chow, and lime. Now anyone that knows about worms will tell you, yeah that will get you castings... But they're not going to be the quality of traditional worm castings. Now I wanted to try to emulate his model, but without changing to the inferior composting worm, and without the cheap feedstock ingredients.
I still used black peat for bedding...
But for feeding the worms I used Alfalfa Meal, kelp, fish bone meal, Oyster Shell Flour, a little bit of lime and Greensand
And I let them go for four weeks, not two.
How'd it go?
Not well. Lol
The worms didn't die (well a few did)
But they weren't thriving and reproducing like they should. They were always trying to escape. And the bedding materials has not been turned into rich castings. Just some amended black peat with some castings.
So lesson learned, there are no shortcuts!
Now I've got a multilevel worm bin set up that I'm feeding food scraps to. I have a friend with pet rabbits and for bedding I'm using their litter after he throws it out. It consists of Alfalfa hay and Timothy hay, a thin compostable cardboard paper product, and of course lots of rabbit manure. I mix it in with some of my recycled soil before its re-amended and throw in some rock dust for grit. Then the food scraps are buried underneath it. I'll update in a few months when I harvest the first castings. The worms seem to be a lot more active in this bin, and they're not trying to escape! Good signs!
lol