When your first bin has completed...

[Jay Blair]

...and your worm population has increased and its time to harvest worms and separate castings, try this.

get a second bin set up ready and put a few 2 or 3 liter bottles of ice on the surface of the bedding of the bin to be harvested.

After a few hours, remove the top 3 inches of castings bag them or set them aside in another bin.

Then reach under the remaining bedding and harvest the "globs of worms " that migrated down to avoid the cold surface. Use these to add to the new bin.

In a small starter bin set up , migration is fairly fast. So each cool induced migration can be achieved in less than 4 hours.

I add my bottles of ice at a rate of 1 bottle every 20 minutes to gradually lower the surface temps.

After harvesting the castings , I keep them open bagged or in an extra tote and water them occasionally to see if any hatchlings appear over the next few weeks .

Any hatchlings I add to the two bin sets , then I use the castings I harvested in my garden as fertilizer or my greenhouse as potting mix component.

[theinfamousj]

You know, on my last harvest, I did the total harvest thing (got 5 lbs of casting) because I was bringing the bin inside so I figured it was time for a rinsing of the bin. Anyway, my largest problem was getting the babies into the "new bin" (really, the cleaned old bin since I dumped onto a tarp) as they could easily make it through my soil sifter and I didn't want to lose that much worm population, since I'm still trying to grow up to a good worm population.

I was just about to ask for something that would make this easier, and then you come along with the ice bottles. That's brilliant! I assume you've tried it, Jay, and that it moves the babies, too?

You know, I still have the harvest that has the babies in it (I reached a point of "screw them"). I'm going to go and see if I can get them to migrate down, right now!

[Jay Blair]

Yes I have tried it and use the technique quite often. It works very nicely on the smaller harvests I now do.

[theinfamousj]

How many hours do you leave the bottles on the top of the soil?

[Jay Blair]

Two to three hors. Basically until the Ice bottle is about half melted.