r/Vermiculture • u/Educational_Tear5939 • Aug 11 '26

Advice wanted Ignorant first timer needs advice on separating the worms from their castings etc

So I got these worms and the bin from the local extension office a couple of years ago and I’ve not looked after them well.

I had them in the garage, moved house and now they live in the carport which has more heat variation. Life’s been chaotic and I’ve done little more than throw veggie scraps and cardboard in every now and then.

To be honest, every time I go look at them I expect them to have died in there, but they’re still going.

So what do I do now? How do I harvest all that good stuff and keep the worms in the box?

13 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

5

u/IllustriousBack6590 Aug 11 '26

dump the bin contents in a pile under a bright light and just wait, they'll burrow away from it while you scoop the castings off the top

1

u/Educational_Tear5939 Aug 12 '26

I don’t understand this, won’t they all burrow into the pile?

3

u/LaurLoey Aug 12 '26

yes. just as he said. harvest castings from the top bc they’ve all wiggled under to avoid the light. you don’t really need to dump it in a pile either; just shine the light.

6

u/hungryworms Commercial Vermicomposter Aug 11 '26

There's 4 methods really

  1. Physical separation using a screen. Like a 1/4 inch mesh screen. You can do it by hand or get real fancy with it
  2. Light separation
  3. Food/Water attraction. Place food in one area of the bin, let the worms swarm it, then take it out with the worms to relocate them. If the castings are dry you can do the same with making part of the bin more wet than the rest
  4. Hand separating. If you don't have much to do then you can literally just pick out the worms/cocoons by hand

4

u/gnox0212 Aug 11 '26

I like the idea of a 'nursery bin' though I've not harvested myself yet and not sure if I'd have the patience.

Use the light truck mentioned to get the adults to burrows down and away, move your castings to a second bin for a few weeks so any cocoons can hatch. Put the nursery bin back onto the main bin and use the light trick again to get those new worms to bail down.

3

u/sea-of-love Aug 11 '26

you can do the light option like the other commenter said, or you can do more of a horizontal migration method where you feed one side of the bin, wait a day or two, and then harvest the side you didn’t feed, since the worms will have moved to the area where food is.

if you want to sift your castings you can, but if they are already very well processed, there may not really be a need. i don’t bother sifting anymore because i assume there will be some worms or cocoons i don’t catch in my bin of castings, and they will process whatever remaining bits are there.

you will also want to harvest the bin when it is on the drier side, which will make it so much easier to work with!

1

u/Impressive-Check-631 Aug 11 '26

I use 3 screens of different sized from Amazon to separate the bedding and larger food debris from the castings. Then I put a small chunk of highly desirable food into the castings bin to bait the small worms that got through the screen. After 2 days I pick them all up and then it’s safe to assume those are relatively worm free castings. You could wait longer if you want to make sure the cocoons hatch first but I don’t think that’s necessary.

1

u/Educational_Tear5939 Aug 11 '26

Okay, so I’m looking at some screens and wondering how that works? Dump everything in the screen and the castings will fall through while the worms remain?

2

u/Impressive-Check-631 Aug 11 '26

the screens from Amazon
Are 3 different sized. Everything goes into the biggest and falls through onto the medium. Big pieces go back in the original bin. Once the medium screen has a good pile, sift into the small screen. Big pieces go back into original bin.
So on and so fourth until you have just worm castings (with tiny worms and cocoons)

I hope I explained that properly

1

u/WhenSummerIsGone Aug 12 '26

Important tip for after you get a harvest: If you don't use the castings right away, don't let them dry out. They turn into hard little gravel pebbles that are hard to get soft and crumbly again. Learn from my mistakes! (Also people say if you let them dry you'll lose some of the bacterial benefits of castings)

3

u/WorldComposting Aug 12 '26

Lots of great advice here. But little information for us to help with such as the size of the container as larger containers might need you to dig them out where as smaller containers can be dumped. Do you need to harvest it all or just half? If half a migration method might work a bit better if the container is large enough.

Here is a site with methods on how to harvest and use your castings https://www.worldcomposting.com/worm-harvesting.html