Purina Worm Chow is my main stay feed. The manure and other bedding material the worms happily eat keeps them in the perfect environment, but the worm chow is the best, easiest, daily feed, especially when things get hectic and I don’t have time to process and properly administer and monitor organic waste.
Other bedding I provide consists of partially composted leaves, small amounts of grass clippings, and shredded newspaper. This would mostly be considered carbon material (except the grass, which depending on how green it is could be counted as nitrogen material). Always remember that even though you are working with worms you are still working with a live composting system, and as such as you add material and mix the ingredients up you will get active composting which will begin to heat up. You must be very careful when you add material to your system that you don’t generate too much heat and kill your worms.
That being said, my personal preference is to provide as varied a diet as possible. Each type of food stock has its own set of bacteria/fungi that feed on it and help the decomposition process. This variety makes for a high quality, very desirable end product.
When I speak of different types of food stock I include the bedding material. The worms eat anything organic and therefore consider everything – bedding and “food stock” – food stock. It all gets broken down my bacteria, fungi and other unseen microbes that the worms then feed on and subsequently poop.
And there you have it! Vermicompost and CASTINGS!!
My vermicompost is about 50/50 castings to compost.
The longer you let your worms work in the material provided the more concentrated your finished product will be with castings.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s all good. But the castings are the best. The castings to me are more important than what most people call the tea, which is just leachate. It is more important to me to keep the worm bin healthy so the castings are of a high quality than it is to try and get “tea” (leachate) from the bin. In order to get a quantity of “tea” (leachate) from the bin the moisture level has to be high.
Better to keep the moisture/oxygen level optimum for the worms than to get extra moisture from the bin for “tea” (leachate).
Happy worming!
Learning so much from you. I just wondered about shredding old newspaper as opposed to new. I mean like a year old from a shed. Any problem with that?
GR
Old newspaper is fine to use. I would only caution you to watch out for spiders. Do your shredding outside and pay attention. I don’t know where you live but where I’m from we have a species of spider that is not friendly.
I apologize if you’ve already answered this somewhere, but I was wondering about what kind of manure to put in my worm bin. I’ve been trying to research dog and cat manure in particular. I have read about the dangers of using this in a typical compost system, well as far as using the resulting compost on food gardens that is. I hear its great for lawns and ornamentals. Would processing the poop through a worm compost fix the inherent dangers of using this poop? What would you recommend? Thanks in advance for your reply.