Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I will say, I’ve grown to love this thing. It was a rough start, though, and I think if this came with a good, comprehensive pamphlet on vermiculture best practices and tips, it would have saved me a lot of headache instead of having to do the research myself. I’ve had this for about three months now. If you’re thinking about buying this and you’re a first timer, like I am, I’d suggest a couple tips. 1. Take it slow. I know it’s hard to fight the urge to load it up with all your veggies, but seriously listen when they say to wait a week, then small bits at a time. The consequence of loading it up with tons of stuff, like I did, was an insane (like that scene in The Green Mile) infestation of fruit flies that took me a month to get rid of. I’ll be traumatized for a while from that experience. I was literally vacuuming them out of the air all throughout my house, literally hundreds a day (I counted) for weeks. So, don’t do that. It was disgusting and I very nearly threw the worm bin away. 2. Buy more worms. I went cheap and got a 250 at first, because I didn’t want to pay for more than that. But they just couldn’t keep up with our waste (two adults). I ended up buying 500 more, and after that, things have been going great because it can process my waste more quickly, which is another fruit fly preventative measure. If I had to do it over again, I’d probably have just gotten 1,000. I was worried to get too many because I thought there would be worms everywhere, but the self-contained system won’t allow for overpopulation. 3. Read up on fruit fly prevention first, and be proactive. Covering the top layer with a sheet of wet newspaper helped a lot, chopping waste into tiny pieces allows the worms to eat faster. I also have a small separate closed container to keep my scraps until I think my worms are ready for them—it’s way easier to manage the ecosystem. And neem oil is a good organic solution to prevent flies—I spray a bit on there once a month or so. Not too much. So, all that said, once I figured out how to actively prevent fruit flies, it’s really easy. Once you get the worms going, it’s very low maintenance. And fun to see baby worms and stuff. The worms don’t actually need to be fed that often. I feed them probably once every two or three weeks, and throw in paper scraps and stuff here and there. You can keep your scraps in the freezer if you want—just make sure they’re room temp before you put them in.