Vermicomposting in the Cold-Climate Apartment - Small-Scale Harvesting of Worms and Eggs

In-between relationships is an excellent time to examine the contents of a vermicomposter. Few and far between are those who comprehend the simple pleasures of spending six or more hours teasing through twenty-five gallons of ‘dirt” with a bread-knife.

I’m moving from a soil-based system to a paper-based system, and the time has come to clear out all the soil.

I place a refrigerator drip-tray on the dining-room table. The tray is white plastic, about two feet by fifteen inches wide, and about one and a half inches deep.

Into one end of the tray I tip a few pints of material from the vermicomposter, and use a small blunt knife to tease soil from the edges of the heap to a clear space in the tray.

I carefully spread out this small amount, harvesting eggs and worms that catch my eye.

Those that I spy are placed into a one-gallon nursery tub, which has been primed with a couple of cups of strained slurry formed in the blender from equal parts of food scraps and newspaper. The strained slurry provides a nutritious and wet bedding for the eggs, recently hatched worms and mature worms that I spy.

Once I’ve examined a small portion of soil, it is pushed to the far end of the tray, clearing the center for the next half-cup full teased from the side of the mound. periodically I scoop the processed soil into a temporary pail.

I continue to load the tray with soil from the vermicomposter, harvest works and eggs that I can spot, and transfer the soil to the pail. Any decent clumps of bedding, which might contain eggs and worms, are transferred immediately to the one-gallon nursery pail.

Anything I spot that might be an egg goes to the nursery pail; if it is really a small yellow pebble, well, no harm done. If it is an egg, well, good. I’d rather have a few extra pebbles than a few less eggs.

Periodically I sieve the soil from the pail. The bulky material is tossed out. There comes a time to get rid of the chicken bones and chestnut hulls.

The sieved soil goes into a spare 5-gallon pail, where it will sit for five weeks at an equable temperature. Any eggs or small worms which escaped my notice will hatch and grow. Five weeks from now I’ll make one more pass on this batch of soil, harvesting the recent arrivals. There ought be no fresh laid eggs, since the mature worms were easy to spot, and were transferred to the one-gallon nursery this day.

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