Disaster on Level Two
Tonight when I was checking on some plants in our
germination room, I noticed that there was a bad smell coming from the worm
bin.
...I added a handful of worms from
level one and some fresh food.
...Also
we need to move the worms out of the older levels into levels that have fresh
food and bedding and we need to remove that finished compost
earlier.
Tonight when I was checking on some plants in our
germination room, I noticed that there was a bad smell coming from the worm bin.
This was unusual consider we have had the bin for over six months and it has
always smelled good. When I opened up the second layer I was horrified to see
that all of the worms had crowded to the corners and died. They were now
starting to stink. The worms in levels one and three were fine. A few theories
as to what happened in level two:
- The
mix was too wet
- There wasn't adequate fresh
food and bedding (newspaper)
- The mix became
toxic to the worms because there was too much worm waste
products
- The bin became too
hot
- There were too many worms in level
two
To fix the problem, I tripled the
bedding by adding fresh, shredded, dry newspapers. I mixed the old bedding into
the fresh and I didn't add any water. I added a handful of worms from level one
and some fresh food. After about an hour the bin didn't smell any more and the
mix looked much drier. Just in case, I added about twice as much fresh bedding
to level one when I added the
food.
From now on we will add dry,
shredded newspaper and only add water when necessary. Also we need to move the
worms out of the older levels into levels that have fresh food and bedding and
we need to remove that finished compost earlier. This should solve all of the
potential problems that I mentioned
above.
The bottom level had finished
compost that smells very earthy and looks like dirt. I am going to add it to
our raised beds in the back yard.
Posted: Sun - April 25, 2004 at 03:35 PM