 Hi there and welcome to my channel. So I've got my worm bin moved into the garage for the winter. These vermicom posting worms have been living out in my garden all summer. They've been pretty badly neglected I have to say but I thought today would be a good time to show you how I kind of set up my bin, how I feed my worms, show you what they like to eat and also going to do some harvesting of some worm castings. So let's have a look at them and see how they're doing. This is a worm bin that I made out of rubber made tubs, very simple. Drilled a bunch of holes in the top here and a bunch around the sides. I do have it set up with a second tub underneath to catch any liquids that may seep through. I haven't had a lot of that happen. So this worm bin is actually almost three years old. I got these worms about three winters ago and started off with them in my basement the first winter and then moved them out to the garden for the summer, moved them back into the garage the following winter and had quite a bad problem with fruit flies in here. So that's why I keep it in the garage now which works fine for me. I have a heated garage so these worms are very happy out here in the garage. So we're just going to have a little look here and I'll try to zoom you in. So you can have a good look because I'm pretty sure I have pretty heavy crop of red wigglers here. So like I said I had them outside in the summer just underneath my potting table in the shade. We'll just pull back here. We've got a lot of worm castings already. As you can see they try to escape the light but I'll just scoop up a big handful here and you can see. Got lots of worms. You can see that they are some of them have eggs in them and stuff. So this is pretty wet right now. I think I need to add some more shredded paper to it. So the fastest way to get them fed is to feed them you know fruit and vegetables, scraps that are you know well broken down already kind of already kind of rotting and then they can start feeding off it right away. So to speed that up I usually take all my old lettuces and different fruits. They like lettuce of course and watermelon, any kind of pumpkin or squash kind of stuff is really good food for the worms. And I'll just freeze this when I get a container full and thawed out and that way when it thaws out it's a lot more mushy and you know quicker for them to get eating at. You can also put your food in a blender and blend it up and that makes it really quick but I just find that a little messy. So I've thawed out this lettuce that I had frozen and some grapes here. So we're going to add this to the bin today. So when I set up my bin I just basically filled it with a bunch of I think I had some compost, coffee grinds, shredded paper. So we have a paper shredder at work so I can just bring home you know an endless supply of shredded paper which works great for filler in the worm bin kind of helps soak up the moisture if there is any that worms like to eat on the paper. I also like to add toilet paper rolls or paper towel rolls. So my method for harvesting the worm castings is pretty simple. With this kind of a bin here what I'll do is I will just start feeding the worms on one half of the bin and do that for you know a couple months and any that are over on this side of the bin will eventually all move over to where the food is and you'll be left with half a bin full of some beautiful worm castings. So once that's done then I can just pull them out. They're usually quite wet I find with mine. Let them dry out and sift them and then I have a nice little stash of worm castings to use in my pots and to fertilize my house plants. So I'll show you how I'm going to do that in a minute. So as you can see right now the bulk of the worms are over on this side and they have potato peelings, bananas, coffee grinds. I've been feeding them toilet paper rolls, crushed up eggshells and they are doing pretty good. Goop up enough so you can see there's a lots and lots of worm castings here and like I say the worms are still in here. So what I'm going to do now with this next batch of food I'm going to put it over here, cover it up with some more shredded paper. So I'm just going to take this lettuce and grapes that I thought out from the freezer, dump it out on this side, cover it up with some shredded paper. I'll probably bring some eggshells or coffee grinds out there too. They like to run those through their system as well. And so over the next month or so I will keep putting my food for the worms on this side of the bin and eventually they will all migrate over to here. Once there's nothing left to eat on this side they'll migrate over here and then this side will be ready to harvest. So sometimes they're trying to escape the bin which is kind of a sign that maybe I got too many. I'm a little bit over populated. So what I try to do is just find somebody in the area who wants some composting worms that I can share with. I can just scoop out a big handful and give them to them and they can start their own bin. So if it starts to look a little dry in here I will just you know sprinkle some water in here just to keep the moisture level up. So that's pretty much all you need to do to keep your compost bin going all winter long. I just keep the lid on here. To help keep that fruit fly infestation out I use this burlap cover on top as well and hopefully this winter I won't have an issue with fruit flies. Then I just keep it in a dark place in my garage. So I also have started some European night crawler bin here and these are the kind of worms that we use when we go fishing up at the lake in the spring and summer. So I thought maybe I should try and see if I can grow and multiply some of these over the winter so that we have a good supply in the spring. So we're going to check out this bin now. So I notice there's a lot of mold in this bin so I'm not sure if that means there's too much moisture. The night crawlers are a much bigger fatter worm as you can see. Try the big one. I'm not sure if they're happy or not. They don't really kind of have the same kind of habits as the red wrigglers but they do seem to be alive and thriving. So I've been feeding these as well the lettuces, the banana peels. I think I got a maybe too much moisture in here. I see some of the potatoes peelings that I had in here are sprouting. So I'm going to just add some more shredded paper just to kind of decrease some of the moisture in here. And I'm sure these also produce castings that we can use in the garden. So I will work on trying to migrate them to one side. What I have learned about the European night crawlers is they're more territorial than the red wrigglers so they don't really like hanging out together and living in masses like the red wrigglers do. So I'm not sure how it's going to work for reproduction and how they're going to make it through the winter but we'll see how it goes. So this is some of the worm castings that I have taken from my red wriggler bin and they were very wet and there's a lot of big chunks in here but I let it sit just on the on the bench here and dry out and now I'm going to try running it through this one inch mesh screening here. This is kind of the same kind of a thing that I have out in my garden to sift my compost and to sift my worm castings outside but I've just grabbed a chunk of it here and put it over top of this pail and we're going to see how much we can sift out of here. There is still quite a few big chunks of egg shells and some dried vegetation but should be able to get a nice little batch of castings here. I like to collect as much as I can and then add it to my soil mixture in the spring. When I'm setting up my containers throughout the summer I'll just grab a handful of my red wrigglers along with some of the castings that they've created just like this and I'll just throw this right into my garden. I'm not sure if the those worms survive the winter if they burrow down deep enough but I'm hoping that they do. So all this stuff that doesn't make it through this sifter here I will just throw back into the bin or take it out to my compost pile. So I'll just give you an idea here of what it looks like once I've run it through a one inch screen. As you can see there's still a lot of little tiny egg shells in there. I don't think that's a big deal these are going into containers in my outdoor pots that'll be good to have. So there you have it. There's a little bit of that black gold that people always talk about they can get from your worms. So after running it through this quarter inch mesh you know you find that you still have some pretty big chunks here and to get that really fine stuff I'm going to use this steel sieve here that I got that's got much smaller holes and we'll just try to work some of this through there and get that finer castings that we can use indoors or in smaller plants. I also like to make vermicompost tea for my indoor plants so I take some of this black gold and put it into a little cotton teabag and soak it in a can of my water that I'm going to be watering my plants with and that is just great to make some worm casting tea for your indoor plants. So basically I have two collections that I'll be doing over the winter. I'll have the larger size stuff like this that I can add to my raised garden beds and outdoor containers and then I'll also have this finer blend that I can use like I say in smaller plants to make my worm tea. I know there is a lot of information and videos online that you can watch to learn how to be a good vermicomposter. I probably am not following all the rules that I should but this is working for me it's not too hard it's not a lot of maintenance and the results are getting lots of this great material to add to your plants. So if you don't already do vermicomposting I highly recommend you go out and buy a Rubbermaid tub. Find somewhere local that you can get it you know just a handful of red wrigglers. I picked mine up from Facebook Marketplace they just gave me a little yogurt container full of worms there was probably I don't 50 hundred worms in there for 20 bucks and I've been keeping my bin going now for three years so I highly recommend if you haven't already set one up to give it a try. So thank you for watching I hope that you will like and leave a comment and if you haven't already done so please hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on future videos coming to my channel. Thank you for watching.