This weekend it was time to harvest the finished worm castings (an amazing organic matter soil supplement) from my worm bin, as the worms had finished eating all of the kitchen scraps and had fully decomposed their newspaper bedding as well. This happens a few times a year. My method was to dump the castings and worms into a large container, and sit the container in the sun. As the worms burrowed down to get out of the sun, I scooped off the top layer of castings and put them in a bucket. Wriggle and slime on down, scoop; wriggle and slime on down, scoop; wriggle and slime on down, scoop; repeat until all that is left is a pile of worms!
In the end, I had a beautiful bucket of worm castings which I placed around my tomatoes, and an amazing number of worms, ready to go back into new newspaper bedding and start working again to turn kitchen scraps into the most amazing soil supplement ever.
