Thousands of worms unloaded from feeding zones of two 150-day old bins to start new bin

Hello everyone and welcome, where was Mary and it's time to eat again. What I have on the menu today is a bunch of fruit products like melon chunks, melon peels, banana peels, and a variety of different vegetables that would normally be included in a soup. like white and orange carrots, a little bit of parsley, there's also some cucumber peels in here I think so it's a pretty good variety of things but mainly sweet for them and one of my other staples that I normally feed them is the ground coffee used so that Everyone is going to be fed today.

I have some containers here that are now 150 days old and it's been a while since they were in horizontal migration mode trying to encourage the

worms

to come out of the compost and head to the

feeding

area, so the last

feeding

of all these trays I bought on the top shelf is seven days and this newest container, which at this point was only 17 days old, was six days since that woman was last. fed, there are a lot of

worms

in there and when I looked in there I could see a good sized indentation where the feeding was, so it looks like they have already taken a big bite out of whatever food was there for them. last time so today I'm giving all these containers some food so I've got the camera going so we can capture some of the worm action in case we find any along the way so we'll get some of my containers. up here on the table so we can

start

the feeding and see what we could see, so this is one of the two trays that are set up as horizontal migrations to try to evacuate the finished compost and round all the worms in one place and the only thing I'm noticing is a little unusual.

I don't normally see some small flying insects hanging around in my containers. I'm not sure what attracts them, but it could be related. until the last feeding I did so I'll try to get an idea of ​​what attracts them to see if I can counteract that, it looks like they are going in and out of this feeding zone, that's where I see most of the activity of these small flying insects. I'm not sure if the camera can pick them up, but I can see them and I think they are mosquitoes or some kind of fruit fly, a type of very small flying insect.

He's a small guy who moves fast. I don't know if maybe I didn't cover the food enough with leaves, so I'm going to assume that's why this happens and when we apply more food to this feeding. area, I'll make sure it's properly covered next time, so as I've been doing recently, I'll usually use some sort of small catcher tray to try to preserve the leaves I'm using as cover because they're still in pretty good shape. , I'll continue to use them as cover unless I have some compelling reason not to, and as I dig into these leaves above, I'm seeing more of these little flying insects, so it's something to do.

With the way I fed most recently and I guess I didn't cover enough, one thing I also usually try to do is keep a level top surface between the two different sides so that if there's a chance to see the when the food, so it's pretty easy to see just by the level of one side or the other, which looks a lot lower than the other side, which I don't actually see much on this side, so I wonder if we'll see a lot of the old food that was already there from the previous feeding, maybe I skipped feeding, so yeah, not sure, let's take a look, but the other thing we've been doing lately is also trying to evaluate how the finished composition itself It's moving towards worm depopulation, so I definitely see a good number of worms hanging out in this almost finished compost, so as far as horizontal migration goes, it looks like it still has a way to go.

I think that's what we had determined the last time we took a look here, so it's not surprising that I only expected to see fewer worms this round, which simply tells us that there is still enough food in this material to sustain the worms. . busy and fed, so they are not yet looking for new grazing areas and it is only a matter of time before this material runs out of any type of food they can continue to consume, so it is inevitable that at some point they will. go in search of greener pastures as I call it recently, so this tells me that it is realistic to continue trying to move the worms or try to bait them out of the almost finished compost and get them to this new feeding area here, so let's go Examine the feeding area itself to see how the relocation of the worms is progressing so it's no surprise that when we

start

looking around here it's full of worms, I mean it's almost nothing but worms and that makes me wonder If that's part of the reason the rest of the worms and the rest of the compost are still there, maybe it's just that there's no room for more worms to get in here because there's just nothing but worms here almost and here and there I feel like I'm seeing a little bit of food left over from the last feeding, but for the most part it's just solid worms throughout the feeding area, so while I was thinking it might just be a matter of replenishing the food here. and just allowing the horizontal migration to continue rethinking this and I'm starting to believe that the best option here would be to do another pull.

I mean, there are so many worms here, but it seems like it would make sense, you know? Get these little guys out of here and put them somewhere else, maybe even set up another new container for these guys, give them a cool place to work because guess what we'll do, that another horizontal migration and we'll find. Same thing, we're going to find a brick of worms out there that need a place to probably relocate and then if we rebuild this feeding area, I think that would probably provide a good stimulus to get the worms that are still in this area out.

Get the finished compost out of there and into a cool environment where there's not a kind of overcrowded situation, so you know, I feel like the best option here would be to get all these worms out of here, why don't we do that? Well, I turned off the camera briefly so I can throw away the recovered leaf material that is in this container that we used a moment ago to remove this leaf covering from the top and I think we could use this container to put the extracted worms in and temporarily until We can prepare something for them, some other place for them to be, so why don't you go ahead and start removing some of this large number of worms from this horizontally migrating feeding zone?

We have some of the food here from the last feeding, you know, I'm actually very surprised to find leftover food from previous feedings with so many worms, let's get more of these guys out of here, here's another piece of cabbage or something, I'm not sure. what it is it definitely has a very strong smell so I wouldn't be surprised if it was cabbage cabbage is one of those things that tends to stink a little it's a piece of melon it's super surprising to see a little piece of the red fleshy melon material still in the shell again due to the large number of worms in this feeding area oh boy, biting off more than I could chew with this handful here, that's a large number of worms in this handful, these little ones here This is just a large number of warm-ups that are happening here and I'm wondering if they should have used a larger container to temporarily put them in, yeah, because this thing is pretty full and boy does it have some weight to it.

I mean, it obviously has some weight. food scraps and a good amount of vermicompost mixed in, but if I had to, if I had to guess what the ratio of real worms to other things is, I would have to guess that it must be at least eighty percent pure. worms on this thing and it has to be, I don't know how much it has to be at least four or five pounds, so probably speaking, you know, a couple thousand worms right here, cool, okay, so let's put all this jibber -jabber. Try to move forward with the matter at hand here, okay.

I don't want to get a bunch of finished compost out of here and the process. I would like to leave it as finished compost so that we can finish taking everything out. from here there are worms at some point later, okay, so let's go ahead and give this faster, let's just give this horizontal migration that feeds on them a quick rebuild, nothing fancy and the cardboard works well as bedding material more close to real fertilizer. Normally I will like it. use shredded leaves because they probably have a better chance of turning into vermicompost more quickly, so that the dividing line between the finished compost and the feeding zone so that when we get to the extraction it can have a consistency closer to that of the finished compost.

Here on the edge, why don't we try to turn this into a nice, attractive feeding area for these little guys? Use some good pieces of melon, as well as a banana peel and a couple of fresh pieces of melon to want to go overboard when putting food. in this feeding area because it seemed like we had eliminated most of the worms, so I'm not sure how many worms are left here, but I assume that what we have put here now will be an adequate amount of food to pique their interest and keep them fed without be too much as it ends up giving off a lot of odor to attract more flying insects, so we're going to take this reclaimed leaf matter that we dug off the top earlier. and throw that in and a couple of other ingredients that I'd like to use here are sand, which in my case is crushed eggshells, pulverized eggshells, so I want to make sure there's some gritty material in here to help with your digestion. and then Also another material that I like to use is used coffee grounds.

Coffee grinds anything. I'm going to try to apply it in such a way that it covers where the food is in the hopes that it creates some sort of barrier so the aroma of the fruits underneath doesn't reach as well, great, so I'll go ahead and give it another generous coat of leaves at the top and I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed, hopefully. We won't see as many flying insects trying to get to the food supply in this container. Okay, very good, very good action in the horizontal feeding migration zone in terms of, you know, attracting worms and helping with the depopulation of finished animals. compost, but just by looking at the compost I think it became clear that this bin will require a little more time before we can harvest this material and assume it will be worm-free when we do.

Okay, looking good, let's get the other container that's the same age as this one here and see how it does; no, this is a slightly larger container than the last one we made trying to get an idea of ​​how this one fares as far as hanging flying insects. It doesn't seem to be that bad, I think the only thing I see now are the insects that were a little scared by what we were doing in the last container, let's do what we did before, let's remove this top layer of leaves, well, you know which we're going to do just to make this bin available again to hold leaves temporarily because it's almost full at this point.

I am going to move our relocated worms to our temporary holding pen for our relocated worms. this container just because I think we're going to need extra space if we do another extraction. Okay, so what I did here was invert the container that all the worms were placed in so that I could put them in this larger container. here, then we'll have plenty of room here to do another pull from this container. You can also see that this is crawling with worms. Alright, this container will be ready for us to place the recovered leaves in a pair. the worms here aren't the end of the world, that's fine, what kind of careless action here is trying to do this retrieval of the leaves in a way that doesn't spread them everywhere?

It's okay, it'll just have to work out fine. We did it before, we're going to try to do a quick assessment here of how the depopulation of the almost finished compost is progressing, so let's poke around here and see how things look. I already see one or two worms. I'm seeing more worms and even more worms, it's unusual because last week when we did this one of the

bins

was starting to appear and I thought it was this one, it was actually making good progress towards the compost becoming depopulated of worms, but for now For some reason I feel like I'm finding a lot of worms hanging on this stuff that I thought a week ago was already mostly depopulated.

I mean, I could be remembering incorrectly, but on the other hand it could potentially be caused by maybe just an overpopulation of worms within the feeding area, maybe it's attracting worms, but it's also repelling them now because it's become so crowded, like thisLet's see what we see here if I assume that once again we will find some kind of very populated feeding zone. area here and I think it will probably be best to depopulate and rebuild it so that we can stimulate horizontal migration and encourage the remaining worms in the material to come out. Don't treat it.

It's over. A composter. Is it mostly? coffee it's hard to say maybe it's better to extract it with worms, yes I think we find a lot of the same here, it's a very densely populated feeding area. I think we better go ahead and extract, maybe if I reposition the camera a little we can do better. Keep track of what's happening here and capture it on video, so I'll start getting these guys out of here a handful at a time. A lot of worms, even this big container full of worms is really starting to fill up a tremendous amount of worms. just look at them all Wow and I mean, I'm holding this container with one hand and I can barely hold it, it's so heavy and you know, I don't really consider myself a lightweight.

I have pretty strong hands and arms. This is a super heavy container full of worms, amazing, so I'm not going to extract any more, let's go ahead and rebuild this real quick. I'm just going to let this action continue here, hopefully. extreme, hopefully allowing the rest of the worms in this container to finally come out of the material so that we have hot, free castings that we can finally harvest well. So many worms, it's incredible,

thousands

,

thousands

of worms and many more to download. Here, like we did before, it's going to take a cue from what we did before and go ahead and create a kind of nice cardboard bed for them on the four outer edges which I guess at some point will also become the section that we're trying to extract. the worms along with any remaining bedding or food left at that time.

I'm going to use a carbon-based bedding material that the mother eats more easily right around the perimeter that is the leaves and we're going to provide a similar feed to as we did on the last beam, maybe just a little more. This is a larger tray, although I thought there would be fewer worms in this material now than there were, so I was a little surprised. Yes, we will do it again. Try to mask all of this delicious, sweet-smelling food from any kind of curious flying insects that might be attracted by covering it as best we can, so I'll use all that salvaged leaf matter that we removed from the top of the feeding zone earlier to place a sort of an initial buffer layer to retain the aroma of the food, we'll make sure to add sand like we did before and then top it all off like we did before with a little bit more. coffee I guess the acidity of the coffee directly on the pulverized eggshell is probably a good way to neutralize any kind of pH imbalance that might be caused by that.

I think the crushed eggshell has the ability to neutralize the acidity of the ground coffee. We will top it all off with a generous top layer of crushed leaves. Hopefully we've done an adequate amount of preparation in these two feeding areas to keep the flying insect population down, since this one wasn't too bad. like the last one was so I just hope it works and I stop seeing all these little flying bugs hovering around my worm

bins

okay man oh man we have a lot of worms out of these bins and it looks like we still have Me There's a little bit of time left before we can consider the castings of these in these containers ready, so those are my two hundred and fifty day containers, let's move on now, here we have my two pots of night crawlers, African night crawlers , European. night crawlers here too.

I'm seeing a fair amount of flying insects hanging around, I'm not quite sure why potentially a testable object for the same reason might be an adequate cover over the last feeding. TRUE? I'm going to extract this leaf cover like we've been doing. I have this little plastic container here, it's a temporary hold on the leaves so we can reuse them at the end, cover them again. All these little flies, the fruit flies, they're mosquitoes or whatever, they're definitely attracted to what's going on here. If I've been watching and following the progress of these bins, you'll know that I recently added a good amount of laundry. bed to the feeding area in the hope that a truck would attract some moisture and absorb it because the container was type. of pouring liquid into the bottom quite regularly, which is why we see a good amount of cardboard here, but I still see a good amount of liquid in the bottom as well and it makes me wonder if I have benefited from a little more dry Carboni material to help absorb moisture.

I think I'll go ahead and put some fresh and dried leaf matter in the middle. I almost wonder if I should have used the I salvaged the leaf matter and used fresh leaves on top to cover them, maybe we will do that in the next container. Hindsight is always 20/20, it's starting to look like they've outgrown the last feeding, so I'm definitely going to add a little more food here. I drop a handful of melon pieces, maybe some plant matter too. Perhaps the greens on top of the fruit will help suppress some of the attractive odor that attracts flying insects.

I really didn't. have a chance to poke around to try to see what the worms look like, let's see if we can get a feel for that here, maybe grab a handful of material from below to see what the worms look like. I'm not really sure what to compare it to this first time with my crawlers, so I don't know what an African Nightcrawler should look like. I can only assume it should be a little larger than the red Wigglers I'm used to working with over the years. so they are definitely everywhere and in good numbers they look happy and healthy let's go ahead and return this leaf material to the top and cover now I know I altered a lot of the food that was here. and I bought a lot of what was below, above, and I may have bought a lot of tempting food all the way to the top, just under a fairly thin layer of leaves, so we'll see how the flying insect situation progresses. in that container maybe in this one we can try to be a little smarter in the process and do it better maybe we use these reclaimed leaves in the feeding area to try to stop the moisture yes I see the same situation here and use fresh leaves on top that are free of any kind of mixed food, putting things aside here again.

I'm picking up pieces of cardboard that were placed here during the last feeding to try to absorb the excess. moisture which I saw as excess moisture as I go down towards the bottom I can see a good amount of worms hanging in there which also appears to be a good amount of moisture so I'm going to give this the same treatment but Instead of using fresh leaves to go down into the hole, I'm going to harvest and return some of these leaves that we removed from the top down into the hole so that they are the things that absorb the moisture first. we add food here again we will give you some banana some melon some plant matter hopefully the plant matter on top masks the smell of the fruity things below keeps the flying insects at bay hopefully all good so let's return what we have left of the recovered leaf material, which isn't really much at the moment, so we'll just supplement it with something new, take this top off well, okay, those are my nightcrawlers, these are the European ones.

The European leg trackers. so things are looking pretty good, let's put these guys back on the shelf and continue, so here's the newest of my containers. I took a look under the covers and it looked like the feeding area from last time had worked pretty well. I thought I saw it. There's a pretty good sized indentation here, but maybe not. I thought it was more prominent to show that the food they received last time had been chewed enough to show a drop in the level of the material in the middle, but it actually doesn't seem that prominent.

At least not as much as I thought and man, I'm surprised to see so much leftover food. I had put a good amount of rice in here and it looks like, in a way, it looks like maybe they're getting into it a little bit, but maybe not a lot, working further down, that's just cardboard, mostly just pieces. casts, it looks like they're producing some nice castings as we start to peel away here, let's see if we can see what else is going on down below. Here in this feeding area this is I guess a piece of paper towel looks like we have a good amount of rice left from the last feeding.

What is this? I really can't say. It sounds like you know there are some vegetables. here maybe I can't tell maybe parts of celery here is another piece of something or other I can't tell what it is maybe a piece of melon peel so it looks like the food in this container isn't really being devoured as fast as I am I originally thought that when I looked inside this container before, I see some bedding materials. I'm seeing leftover rice from the last feeding that might take a little longer to break down, but I'm sure it will go away over time.

It makes me wonder if maybe I could inject that huge amount of worms we just extracted from the other two containers into this container. I'm definitely seeing jumbles of worms here and there, they must have had something good or another to eat there. so they are all piled up right there, so clearly there are places where the worms are hanging out doing their thing devouring the food that has been added. I'm just wondering if it would be a mistake to add so many worms. It probably already has a good amount of worms, so I was pretty sure that the number of worms in this container was pretty high.

I didn't want to overload it with too many worms. Yeah, I think I'm going to leave the number of worms in this container as is and it seems to me that maybe the worms that we just pulled from those other two horizontal migrations would be better off in a new, newly built container that we can put together very quickly, so why not? If we do that, let me go ahead and lay out some cardboard for these little guys to put in some korah ground coffee, so I'm going to try to get into the habit of adding grain a little more regularly than I have in the past, so We'll throw some sand here.

I will add some foods, but I won't go overboard too much, I will just try to encourage them to finish what they had previously received and not just that. but the amount of food I have left here is not much and if I build a new container for those worms to launch into, then I need some food to build that container, so let's do it like this. I think I'll try to use some of this leafy stuff that we had up originally just use it to cover down here. What else do we have? I guess we put this paper towel in here and cover it. food again, I'm just trying to eliminate the flying insect situation, so I'm trying to keep temptation away by covering anything that might have an attractive smell that could attract flies and flying insects, so let's go ahead and start use it. the remaining leafy matter is just covered with no, I don't actually smell any food, I'm the only one who smells that kind of earthy feeling you get from any old worm bin, I'm not going to try to fluff the edges here. so I could see how the edges are progressing, okay I think this looks pretty decent, I'm just wondering if I could benefit from a little bit of an extra thin layer of leaves on top, spread a little bit on the top here again, just I'm trying to preserve. some of the leaves that I got in this box to create a new environment for those worms that we just removed in those two horizontally migrating feeding areas.

Right now, it's about creating a new habitat for those worms, so this is I'm going to have to go pretty fast because I have an errand to run. I have my little reminder on my Amazon Echo upstairs reminding me that it's time to go soon, so you might even hear the alarm going off in the background when you're in bed. a bit of a cardboard package, the cardboard to serve as bedding material on the bottom layer here, something else that's been accumulating as a sort of surplus are these coffee filters, I've done my best to keep them every time I prepare coffee and I emptied the previous batch.

I've been setting them aside to use here at some point but I'm stacking them and not using them so I thought now is a good time to do it and I'm almost Thinking that the material the worms are in in this moment could serve as a pretty good generic material for them to be in because it already has a good amount of bedding material and also some food scraps, so I'm wonderingif I could The best thing would be to just throw them out at this point, so let's see what we get when we pour this container that's full of worms here, then I'll spread it out and assume that this Ernie has a pretty good mix of everything.

We need a good container. Wow, that's a lot of work. I'm going to start spreading this out gradually, I probably started with three or four separate containers with this many worms, so this is going to become an incredibly hungry container. I can Already I'm crazy, wow, so the material they're in already has some food left, but we set aside some food from the feed ration to put here for them, so let's add that back. I'm going to try using some coffee filters here and we'll just throw in the rest of the food that was bought here to feed us.

I just want to spread that out a little bit here as well. I'm definitely running out of materials. here, so I might need to go outside and reload my container that's full of leaves because it's certainly not full anymore, it's really just leftovers, I want to make sure I've covered all of this properly and that's not going to be enough. Let me shoot outside real quick and grab some more leaf matter to finish this off. I'm back and I have a fresh load of leaves in my leaf supply box so this will be a nice generous pile of leaves all over the top so I can already see some of these little flying insects flying around my warrior The material the worms were resting on is a sort of mixture of food materials and since at this point we are heavily composting the bedding and everything else, it seems like a good idea to pile the leaves up. on. quite thick here because the leaves themselves will also serve as a food substance for them and you know we have a lot of worms here so they're going to be hungry and I think I think they're going to be hungry.

I'm going to start eating these leaves, and since they're a little dry, I'll do a little trick that I usually do with some of my containers, which is to place another container right on top of them to create this. terrarium effect, so on top of that, I'm going to take another container of the same size and place it right on top so that tells me at that point evaporation has a chance to occur, whatever moisture is in the container eventually evaporates and condenses again . Go down to land again on those dry leaves so that the entire humidity level in that container becomes constant at all times.

I'm going to leave that part at it, it shouldn't take more than a day or two, so I'll check back. We'll talk about this soon just to see how that huge load of worms are doing, but I guess I need to get a new sticker that will say September 30th, so we have a new container, an unexpected new container that wasn't there. I was really hoping for it today, so that's okay, thanks for joining me. I hope you enjoyed the video, if you did remember to give me a thumbs up which is always greatly appreciated and also consider subscribing to my channel which is always greatly appreciated.

Okay, everyone, I have to run. thanks for watching bye