not much to add.. I have raised earthworms in my basement in Canada..red wigglers..just using rubbermaid containers, lots of veggie and fruit scraps and manure( horse manure which i went and fetched from a local university farm..just a little.
we are vegatarians so fruit and vegetable scraps were plentiful.... and it worked.
No fancy set up. Well, it was a little fancy.. in that we had to make it worm friendly.
i really enjoyed reading this ..from a post also on this thread
http://bb.bbboy.net/thejourneyforum-viewthread?forum=7&thread=41&postnum=10when i did this ( some 20 years ago) ii had read "worms eat my garbage" and "let it rot" for all my information.(good books already mentioned in this thread, i think,,..not sure if i saw 'let it rot' mentioned, it is more for composting info.
in the past few years, some friends of mine wanted to try it in THEIR basement and they got something looking like the photos of "the worm factory."
Being vegetarians and eating lots of fruits and veggies, they always had an abundance of food for the wigglers..
UPS left the box of live red wigglers in my garage and somehow, they were uncomfortable in the shipping container..so they ate the part of the box and i found them wiggling around in my garage when i got them home from work..
anyway, i took the device and the wigglers to my friends, and they set it up in their furnace room downstairs.in basement.. had a good temp year round of about 60 degrees, i would think.
One member of the family took care of feeding duties .. She actually used a food processor to munch up the scraps to give them..never froze anything but used fresh..
Probably not the precautions necessary in a cold climate against mites and bugs and things to have to freeze scraps first.
The thing worked out well.. the worms grew and multiplied.. They used mostly tea.. I cannot remember my friend saying that she used the castings..ever.
i do not remember her screening anything to remove the worms so that she could use the castings.
strange enough..
I do not live next door , however, but some distance away..so i did not know here garden regimen
she did say that when she put the food on the very top of the gizmo, which had layers, that all the worms migrated up to the food, so i guess that screening the castings out would not have been so difficult..
i myself on my rubbermaid contraption, just put everything out in the compost heap as soon as the weather warmed up, i had read somewhere that red wigglers do not do well in soil ,but i think if a person were to do a lasagna method in soil, or added some food scraps, and the temp was right, they might do ok.They like the fresh scaps to do best, i think and to breed and thrive.i know that the really cold temps definitely "do them in" however.
cheerio
alice
