Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Harvest Season

If only I had more time in each day...
Today I harvested the worm castings from the bottom bucket which has been working for almost a month. We got a great harvest, but I had wanted to put it in the garden while it is super fresh. I just ran out of time, and had to leave for the long weekend. In harvesting the castings I found something pretty exciting (for those of you who get excited about this kind of stuff)!





Any guesses as to what it might be?
Here's a close up......


It's a cocoon! There are so many of them in the buckets!
We're having babies!!

Actually we already had some! They are easiest to see in the bin with just paper, but unfortunately the picture came out pretty blurry. The baby is just about in the center of the picture. See it? Check back next week and I will try to find a baby and get a better picture.


**To clear up any confusion, I learned that worms DO mate. Any worm can mate with any other worm because in effect they are all males and are all females.**


The worms in the experimental bin have begun to really change too. The Bin with just food is pretty nasty. It is a stinky gelatinous mess where there seem to be more maggots surviving than worms. That bin may be aborted very soon. Thankfully the bins are OUTSIDE.

The bin with a combo of food and paper is doing much better. There is a nice supply of castings building up on the bottom, and the worms are alive and active.

The bin with just paper is pretty neat to. In this bin you can really see the castings because there are no coffee grounds to get confused with castings. The interesting thing about this bin is that many of the castings look just like paper... worm-poop-shaped paper!!
If it wasn't that we are thinking of using this experiment as our science fair project I would immediately abort the all-food bin, and add the paper only worms back to the original bin. I think that the worms need more than just paper to live on, but at the same time, need some 'bedding' to break up the food particles. Anyone else have ideas about this? Just leave your ideas in the comments so others can read.

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