My Stackable Vermiculture: make your own organic nutes!

My grow being organic its very important to maintain a healthy population of beneficial bacteria to break down my organic nutes and make them available to the plants as well as provide nutrients that are already available to the plants, thats why I have taken on worm farm farming! Worm castings are full of nutrients and teaming with beneficial microbes, they are a living organic fertilizer. I created my own vermiculture so that i can start making my own top notch organic worm castings to mix with my potting soil and make worm teas with for watering! It was really simple ill explain it incase anyone is interested in making their own. What I created is known as a stackable system. It is great because it separates the worms from their castings for you making them easy to harvest. It is made up of multiple stacking trays with holes on the bottom. The holes allow airflow, drainage, and most importantly they let your worms travel away from their castings and up into a new tray full of food when its time!

To create the stackable trays I took one of those big 5 gallon water jugs, cut it in half, and punched a tun of holes in the bottom. I have another jug also that still needs to be cut so I only have two for now but eventually I will have 4 trays. These jugs make good trays because they are shallow and wide which is perfect for composting worms (they are surface feeders) plus they stack nicely. Heres a picture of one of the trays before I added my bedding:



To get my first tray started I made bedding out of shredded newspaper, cardboard, and leafs (maple and cannabis) which I soaked in water for about 30 min and then rung out all the water I could. I fluffed this bedding and mixed it with 15 pounds of composted cow manure that was full of red worms. The 15 pounds of manure is a little too much material for my tray, but as the worms break it down its mass will go down drastically so it should all fit much better pretty soon. The manure was advertised as having at least 200 red worms, which is about .2 pounds of worms. Thats not enough for a really active system like I would like, so today I picked up another 200 red worms from WallMarts live bait fridge as well as 25 green night crawlers and another 25 of some other sort of night crawler. The night crawlers arnt as good for composting as red worms but I wanted a little variety in my system. So heres a shot of the first tray with its roughly 450 worms (.45 pounds), you can see a lot of the night crawlers on the top of the bedding:



The system is really simple:
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1. eed the worms half of their body weight in food scraps per day (about a quarter pound of food for my system) by burying it in their bedding
2. Once their bedding has converted to about 80% worm castings add tray with fresh bedding on top of the current one
3. Continue adding food to the top tray and wait as the worms finish up the last of the food in the bottom tray and move up into the new tray in search of new food
4. Harvest the pure worm castings from the bottom tray!

Its that simple to make your own organic fertilizer for cheap! I plan on utilizing three trays at a time so that the bottom tray has plenty of time for all of the worm eggs in it to hatch before I remove it. I want all those baby worms! apparently the worm population can double every 60 days, so I am looking forward to having a full pound of worms in the near future! Anyways... I hope that someone found my little tutorial helpful in putting together their own low budget vermiculture

I have spent a tun of time researching this before I set up my system, so if anyone has any questions I can probably help answer them. Ill also update with my progress as I start to add more trays on top of this one and harvest my worm castings.

PEACE​

 

Im really glad to have inspired you! It is so so simple. The worms do all the work for you!

Hey Jerry, I have seen you all over the organics forum but im not sure we've ever talked. Its good to finally meet you! That thread is awesome, it was a huge source of info for me in setting up my little system. Im still only half way through it though, I will finish up and get subbed in ASAP. Thanks!