I highly recommend this worm bin. I got my 4-tray Worm Factory at the end of Oct 08, so it's been 4 months. I started out with ordering 100 worms, which might have been a mistake because they recommend 200 (2 lbs). But because I'd never done this before I didn't want to take the chance on killing 200 worms at once. You buy them in 100 (1 lb) lots.

The tray system was easy to put together, it took only a few minutes. It also comes with your initial bedding of coconut husks. Ideally you will want to put your farm into place, and then get your worms. There are instructions on the top of the lid of the bin to tell you what to feed your worms with, and a great guide that also comes with the bin.

So you've got this system of trays, at the bottom sits the tea collecting bin and directly above that goes your first tray, initially placing the food in the corners at the bottom of the tray and covering above it with mostly fibrous material. After about a month you stop feeding them on the lower tray and then start the same process to a second tray up above. The theory being that the worms will migrate up to the fresh/new food above. For me this process takes more than a month, but then, I have half the worms.

The worms do not seem to migrate up all that well on their own, but, from what I've learned reading since, that seems to be the reality for all upward-migration worm bin systems, not just this one. A good percentage of them do migrate upwards. So, because of their obvious lack of intelligence, (they ARE merely worms after all) when I start another tray I wait a a week or so and then simply pick out the worms left in the lower tray or trays. Their system would likely work fine without this step, but remember, I have half the recommended dosage, and it's just that I hate to leave any worms behind in their castings when they could keep eating and reproducing. My hope is that babies will be made and the population will grow.

I was worried about all the rules with food and chopping it up. Believe me, you don't have to chop everything up super fine. It will probably be faster if you do, but I don't (always) bother. I do run fruits through the microwave to kill fruit flies though.

I'm not certain I'm the best worm farmer in the world, I tend to forget them, even though they are sitting in plain sight in my kitchen. Well they're VERY quiet! It's not like they're knocking on the sides of their trays for food. I'm sure you're wondering, but no, absolutely no smell whatsoever. NONE. But the point is, they seem to be surviving my periods of neglect, perhaps because there are only 100. How much can a worm actually eat? I haven't harvested any of it yet, but I can see I've got some good compost happening. I've still got one more tray to go, which should be ready about spring, and then I will harvest what's ready and buy some more worms now that I'm more comfortable with the process. After that the whole process should speed up by about double.

(Posted on 2/23/09)