Whoa Simon, there is a little more to it. If you just put a couple pounds of bought worms in your freshly started windrow, you will not likely have success. You may or may not see them again... You need to start a small worm system. That way you can learn and grow your own herd.The principles you learn managing a small system will apply to your larger endeavor and help make it a success. You could build yourself a worm bin out of scrap wood. Maybe use some recycled fence posts like I did and check off another box. A simple wood frame sitting on the ground . Mine is 3'x5'x18" open bottom, and with a plywood hinged lid. This could be your breeder box for your windrow. It would also be your learning center. You could also add your kitchen waste..... another box! When you buy worms, they are usually raised on a certain and regular feedstock. In this area, horse manure is widely used. When they arrive to the buyer, they are usually put in a environment and feedstock that is quite different, and they want to leave. It takes them awhile to settle into their new home. Buy local bed-run worms if you can find some. If you could source some local horse manure to start you herd in, and slowly transition them into eating aged dog poop, it would help you. Doubling your herd every 3 months is a good rule of thumb. It can be faster if you provide a good environment with plenty of food and space to grow .If you do well you can seed your windrow next year. I would not worry about de-wormers as long as you compost or age it first. You should do that anyway. Start your windrow now and let it slowly cold compost. Best of luck, and let us know how it goes..... Pete

As per a recently resurrected post I made in 2005 on Worm Digest: redhen User A Protected Species Earthworm Posts: 652 graph You can learn a lot from a worm - 2005/11/18 10:21 After 5 years of working with worms in bins, I realize what an incredible journey I have been, and am still on. What a great science lesson I've had. Looking in with kids and adults, at the bins we have made, discussing what is going on, how necessary all the creatures are, working on their own specialty. How they all have to be there, and that no one creature can do it all. There is a new understanding of diversity and community. Talking about how things work in nature, it becomes very clear that we humans are the fly in the ointment. We like our conveniences and we like our food and yards to look perfect and pretty, (to a fault). We spray herbicides and pesticides, helter skelter, so we have an easier time growing our vegetables, fruits and yards. In doing so we destroy the soil with chemicals and then eat, breathe and walk around in all those residues. We spend way too much time and energy trying to exclude ourselves from the not so pretty side of a natural process or cycle. We should, I think, be spending much more time trying to learn how we humans fit in. I believe, also, that things happen for a reason. I have been asked many times how/why I got started doing this vermicomposting business. I am beginning to think that there is something greater that I am going to learn and be part of as I read articles on reasearch being done. My family , as I am sure many families are, dealing with cancers of many types. My family, in particular, has 3 members with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. Immune diseases give me great pause. I am of the opinion that we humans are obsessed with cleanliness. Antibacterial soap is one point. We do not like to think about bacteria being on or in our bodies. We are "above" that stuff. Fact is we are swimming in bacteria and it must be there for our health. They are altering our foods, to make them disease resistant, so production will be greater. If these foods we eat are modifyied to rid plants of disease, and make them look pretty, I am wondering what price we pay, when what we are eating no longer has the nutrients and living enzymes it was supposed to have. I just read the article in "Latest News" about enzymes and worms. Very interesting! (This is actually really "old news", if you look at the dates of some of the research.) I am starting to think, I was meant to start this little project at my daughter's elementary, working with worms, dirt and kids. I might have never met some of the folks doing such interesting work/research, read any of these articles or even been making this very long post, hoping to start another interesting conversation. Susan Quinby-Honer redhen@nc.rr.com Starve the Landfill...Feed the Earth." The journey is still on, just as, if not more intense and fun.

in my large outdoor bin, I add layers of fresh compost [just past hot stage] to keep the worms moving up - works ok even in winter, as long as there's a good layer of some insulating material on top, but I'm looking for finished castings, not worried about population increase, but I'd say they "thrive", always lotsa population in the spring don't forget that worms and heat are not compatible - in a hot compost the worms go away from the heat, which is where the food would be - my experience is they'll go down more than out, prolly cuz they get more nutrients from the natural leaching you're talking 2 different scenes, multiplying the worms to get a large population, and useing worms to process large amounts of material - the population increase should work the way you're going, but hot composting will process the material faster and more reliably ..... and then it can be used for raising worms as far as generating useful heat from composting, the heat needs to be generated right where it's used [like in a greenhouse floor, or right next to it, or in the "hotbed" situation], and compost must be continually worked in order to stay hot - winter piles are harder to maintain at high temps, mostly due to the higher ambient humidity w/ lower ambient temps, which causes poor moisture cycling - my experience and experimenting say it's not a practical or reliable heat source keep us posted on your progress :) Bill

Since I have created a flow through bin with a similar design, I think I will jump in and answer a couple of questions. First, pictures. My bin has a harvesting system similar to Worms4Tracy's. Since I was concerned about the weight of the VC sitting on the harvesting rods, I decided to start with a PVC frame. I did not think that the bin walls would be strong enough to hold up what I estimate to be about 100 lbs of vermicompost. In these first two pics you can get an idea of the approximate size of the bin. The bin walls are made from HDPE corrugated plastic (old campaign signs). One thing I learned while making this bin is the there is no adhesive that will hold HDPE. I tried silicone caulking with only slightly successful results. The screws holding the frame in place and the wood frame around the top opening are probably doing more to hold this together than the silicone caulking. The walls are double thickness corrugated plastic with the seams in each layer as far as possible from the seams in the other. So far this has held up, though it does bulge a bit. Looking down into the finished bin, you can see the harvesting rods in place. I have screws, like Worms4Tracy, but I also screwed in fins of the corrugated plastic. I don't know whether they were necessary. They have held up through a harvesting. One thing I did notice is that they do not allow as much air flow as I think a good flow through should have. I lined up the pvc Ts with the fins so that I could tell which way the fins were turned inside the bin. Here the fins are turned up. OK, observations: This bin took a long time to fill up. I would have to do a little digging to determine just how long, but more than a year. Someone feeding a little more aggressively could have filled it up faster. The first harvesting worked, but it was hard to turn the rods. Now to answer the two questions I want to address: > my main question for this type of design... what prevents > the entire contents of the can from spilling out the > bottom once you turn the pipes (with screws). Simply this: The VC packs down pretty tightly in the bin. When you turn the rods, you are literally scraping the bottom layer off of the VC. Everything above that is packed in tight enough that it just won't fall. > You could make a box frame to support the bottom. Yes, you could, as you can see. I harvested for the first time several days ago, and the VC still has not settled enough to allow a second harvesting. I have even poked at the VC from underneath with my fingers and a letter opener. I cannot loosen up the VC enough to get it to settle. I have tried leaving the fins open for a couple of days to see if the VC would dry out enough to get it to fall. So far, no. My guess is that it is the frame that is preventing the VC from settling. Since the VC is a compressed mass, it wants to slide down an unobstructed bin in one big mass. I believe that the frame is preventing that from happening. I was hoping that harvesting would remove most of the VC from the center of the mass, and the rest would collapse under the weight of the VC on top of it. So far, that has not happened.