Hey Jerry I wanted to thank you for the great red wigglers that i received. They are very efficient and seem to be doing their job quite nicely.  I had a quick question. I am now filtering my first batch after I got the red wigglers and getting some great soil but I was wondering what you use to filter the leaves from the soil and also how you seperate the worms and their eggs/coccons from the soil. Any help would be appreciated it.

thanks
Dr Luis

Hi Dr. Luis,

You are very welcome. Sounds like everything is going well for you.

If you still have a lot of leaves in there, it is not yet time to harvest. If I remember correctly, you haven’t had your worms for that long. If that is true, you will not yet have that many castings built up yet. Keep the worms alive and they will do what they do…eat, poop, breed. More worms means faster breakdown into castings and your leaves will “Disappear” over time.

It sounds like you are excited to use your castings. That’s great. You could always just pull out a couple of handfuls of castings to feed your plants. If you want to do a full harvest, you will need to wait until the worms break down the leaves…or, unless you plan on getting into the casting business, there is no real reason to filter out the leaves. They are just organic material and will not cause any harm. They just don’t “LOOK” as pretty as finished castings.

Multiple ways to get the worms out of their castings. You can push everything to one side and put some rotting vegetation covered with fresh bedding on the other. The worms will come to the food. Another way is to dump the contents of your bin outside in the light on a tarp. Make several piles and walk away for 30 minutes. When you come back out, most of your worms will be at the bottom of those piles in an attempt to get away from the light.

Forget about trying to screen the cocoons…it’s a losing battle without a commercial harvester with special screens. Not a big deal because you will accumulate more worms than you had anyway.

Just remember, worms are like ants. You will lose several hundred (Or drive yourself NUTS trying to salvage them all), but you will have gained several thousand. Not a bad trade off.