What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the podcast. Today I had to harvest out my worm castings and I figured what I would do is talk a little bit about four different ways that you can do this because I think when most of us start vermocomposting, we're all excited in

gung-ho and then when it comes time to harvest them, we think, oh my gosh, how do I actually

do it without harvesting out all of my worms as well or just in a way that causes them as little distress as possible?

So let's go ahead and talk about four different ways that you can do this and the recommended method that I have as well.

First though we do have to understand how earthworms respond to different stimulus so food,

moisture and light. Our wiggly friends, they love the top six to

eight inches of compost, leaf litter, food scraps, etc. This is even more true when we're verma composting because we're creating this beautiful environment for them.

It's actually crazy to see how composting worms respond to anything in the curcubit family, like a pumpkin, a cantalope, or a watermelon.

They decompose really quickly and the micro-population around those particular veggies or fruits is insane and worms just flock to them.

So worms are definitely attracted to the all you can eat microbeafet, but they are also attracted to moisture and that's why a poorly ventilated or

overfed worm bin will have excess moisture pooling at the bottom and lots of

worms will be hanging around that moisture. The one thing that all Earthworms hate is sunlight.

They will do anything they can to avoid bright lights. So now that we know what worms find attractive, what they want to go towards, and what they find

repellent, what they want to run away from, that will help you design a method that you can actually

use to separate your worm castings, right?

It just cause and effect.

How do these worms respond and how do we manipulate that?

So here's the craziest one and this is one I haven't done personally because I think I value my time a little bit too much but you can go the manual sorting.

Manually sorting thousands of worms. So there's about a thousand red wiggler worms in the average pound from verma compost.

That's certainly possible, but it's very tedious.

But I do know some hardcore verma composters that will do that, and they find it a pleasant way to spend hours kind of like knitting right so if that's your thing

you can definitely just manually sort and you're in a good spot

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