A Winner is Named

The worms made it through the Winter break without incident! They are doing very well, and have really reduced the amount of waste in the green buckets. The buckets were almost full before break, and now they are down to about half. Some more good news is that there is no smell with the indoor setup, and no unwanted guests.

Now the outdoor experimental bins are a different story! The bin with just paper has a couple of worms still left alive, but the worms are not able to make anything useful with the paper. Basically they made piles of casting-shaped newspaper beads.

The combination bin (food and paper) was pretty nasty after the two weeks away. The worms had created a sludge out of the food and paper, and most of the matter is now unrecognizable. This would be great for the garden except that there were also hundreds of fruitfly families including cocoons, maggots, eggs, and the flies. YUK! The worms are really doing well though, and reproducing rapidly. There are too many baby worms to count.
Click to enlarge (but not right after lunch)

So here is my plan (unless anyone has any better ideas). I am ready to call the combination bin the winner. The question is what to do with the worms and babies. I can't bring them back to the main bin because I don't want to risk getting fruit flies inside. Ewe. I picked out as many adult worms as I could find with a plastic fork and put them in the 'newspaper only' bin. Then tried to get a few of the babies out too, but they are so tiny. I plan to leave the babies in the sludge until they are big enough to pick out. In a few weeks I guess I'll just dump the rest of the sludge into the garden for the plants.

Happy Worms Breaking Down Our Leftovers