Hello all! We are new to worm farming and have watched a dozen or more videos on youtube and a few other sites about how to get started without having to order a large, expensive, or complicated system. We have two large rubbermaid totes with tiny holes for ventilation and drainage. We put a brick between them, then stacked them inside of each other for drainage purposes. We then dumped a large back of potting soil from the superstore into the bin, then added some shredded carrots (lots of shreddings) and covered it all with newspaper and poured about half a gallon of water across the top to moisturize the paper. Finally we lifted the newspaper, then put dozens of worms in we also bought from the supercenter (earthworms, the kind in sporting goods sections for fishing bait).
After several days we opened the tote and noticed maggots eating away at the carrots and newspapers, we read that it didn’t really harm the worms so we left things as is and added a few cucumber peelings for good measure.
After several more days we opened the lid and decided to sift through the soil and see how our worms were doing. There were NO worms at all. No dead worms, no live worms, and no sign at all that there’d ever been a single worm in the bin.
This is the second time we’ve tried vermicomposting, and the second time we’ve had the same result. We need a little advice on what could be going wrong, we are doing every thing we read to be correct, and our setup even looks a little more efficient than some we’ve seen on the internet videos.
