Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've used the Worm Factory 360 for about 3 years now and it continues to do the job with little effort, while taking little room and being overall cleaner and easier to manage than other bin systems or DIY systems. I'll try and condense the knowledge I've learned to help those looking to start quickly and easily. Here's what I've found are the essentials to a great worm bin: 1) Quality Shredder, I am using a Fellows DS-3 but any $50-60 shredder that can do at least 12 sheets should be fine. This allows you to shred all the Amazon cardboard boxes, which are great since they have biodegradable tape that doesn't need to be removed. 2) Cardboard. As mentioned above, I *ONLY* use cardboard as my worm bedding for a few reasons, it doesn't get all mealy/sticky like newsprint and whitepaper, but it also has glue that apparently the worms love. It also tends to look better while composting being brown and the end compost looks great too. You can use the newspaper and bills/white paper in the outdoor compost bin instead. 3) Perlite. The kit comes with Volcanic rock or pumice that is similar, but you can buy a huge bag of Perlite at the big box store for super cheap and its even lighter and more porous than Pumice. Perlite allows better drainage and aeration in your worm bin, and prevents the compost from compacting and getting hard which will happen once it is nearly fully composted. 4) Coffee Grounds. If you want to keep the risk of pests down, coffee grounds are pretty much the only food scrap you need to have awesome vermicompost. Worms love it and the grit and texture resembles nearly finished compost as well. 5) Extra bins. The instructions say up to 8 bins, but I have 10 and it is no problem. More bins mean less effort and need to harvest bins to get finished compost. 6) Purina Worm Chow. This stuff is great in the winter months when you have fewer fruit scraps and you want to just let your worms live out the winter with minimal effort. Just dust the top of each bin with this every week or two and your worms will stay nice and active through the entire winter. In past years I didn't use this and my worm population tended to get tiny and thin out probably due to lack of food. Optional/beneficial stuff if you have it around: Blender for blending food scraps. Egg shells, blended to a fine powder with your blender, worms really like it but not 100% necessary. Food scraps in moderation. Peat moss or coconut coir. I prefer Peat Moss since it is cheaper and finer than coir, but I don't add it to my bins, I mix my compost with Peat Moss in the Spring when I make my gardening/potting mix. Now that I've laid out the stuff I use, I really don't follow the "instructions" that much because well, worms are stupid critters and they don't really follow "rules". They will move upwards to find food, but they will also move down and stay put. My general rule of thumb is that I have almost all of my bins active through the summer months, and then in the winter, I just let the worms turn all of the food and bedding into really fine Vermicompost that I harvest in the Spring to put into the garden. During the summer months, instead of moistening cardboard like the instructions state to start a new bin, I will just fill the bottom-most bin with DRY cardboard. Why? Because when you are actively feeding food scraps to the bin, a lot of water will be introduced into the system and filter down through each bin to the bottom. The great spigot system will catch this as Leachate, but I generally find I still have too much and would rather have the extra Leachate captured and held within the system. What better way than to have that Leachate become the moistening agent to new bedding and start a new bin with a microbial kickstart? Each time I feed the bin, I will feed ALL of the bins, but feed them less than if it was a single bin getting food.. I've found doing it this way, you can process much more bins at once and also keep a higher population of worms throughout the system. I will also add more dry cardboard on top of the feed, which allows the cardboard to soak up some of the moisture from the scraps but also add to the overall compost that ends up in each bin. You can also turn the bedding in the bin to add some oxygen to the mix. Once the bin is mostly fine composted matter (your eyes will tell you), I will stop adding cardboard but I will continue feeding scraps, more fine, easily broken down as the bin gets closer to harvesting. The main benefit of keeping all bins active is that I don't need to try and play Saving Private Wormy when I harvest the bins. I just scoop out entire bins that are done and any worms that I pull out go into my garden, which is no big deal because I have 9 other bins full of active worms. If you actively stay on top of the worms and add bedding like I described, you can probably still harvest compost every 6 months or so. If you don't add new bedding, you can harvest every 3 months but you will end up with some very thin beds as the material compacts down. Generally I will stop feeding my worms food scraps in October or so, and then switch to Purina Worm chow to keep them going through the winter. Also in the winter you will need to add water as the lack of food scraps and dry cool air can make your compost dry out. If you're not careful, this will also kill off your worms. Generally, every 2 bins = 5 gallon bucket of Vermicompost. So when it comes time to harvest in the Spring, I have about 4-5 buckets of awesome Vermicompost ready to go into my veggie garden. I also harvest 1-2 buckets through the summer but tend to keep the top-most bin nice, aerated and composted to use for Worm Tea. This method of feeding each bin is also a good way to keep pests down to a minimum, if you have too much green, especially fruits, that allows the pests like fruit flies, maggots and mites to take hold. If you only have a little bit in each bin, the worms will eat up all that green matter before pests can take hold. Finally, try not to add seeds into your fruit scraps, if you do, make sure to blend them or freeze the scraps as they will germinate and become volunteers next year! Worms love some scraps more than others, melon rinds are their favorite, followed by leafy greens, banana peels. They love corn cobs but these take awhile to break down so you'll want to move them to other bins to keep composting. Hope this helps and happy Vermicomposting!!!!