Good to know! I don't plan on adding any more to the pile, but it's nice to hear that what's in there already can be left alone. By the way, it's beginning to smell a lot like the dump. I need more blooms to overcome the stench.

Reed, For me it is a choice about health. I'd rather have blemished food any day of the week than food sprayed with chemicals. And, like Helen, I have plentiful wildlife and don't want to do anything that will harm it. My dad used all kinds of chemicals in the 1960s and 1970s but by the 1990s had mostly given them up and, if anything, his garden's health was better after he almost totally eliminated pesticide usage than it was before. He still kept a bag of Sevin dust in his shed and might have used it occasionally, though I don't remember him using it in the 1990s and beyond. I kind of think he held on to it as a sort of security blanket just in case he might need it again. I have found that if I treat my garden as an ecosystem, it is chock-full of all sorts of living creatures, both good and bad, but about 75% of the time the good bugs and other creatures keep the bad bugs under control. The remainder of the time I try to ignore the pest damage as much as possible, and then use eco-friendly methods like hand-picking the bugs to gain some control over them. I'm in a wild rural area surrounded by thousands of acres of rangeland in its natural state so it would be impossible to wipe out all the garden pests even if I tried, and I don't try. I practically live in my garden, at least until the worst heat arrives, and I don't want to be in a chemical-treated garden. Different strokes for different folks, though, and I know some people are perfectly happy using synthetic pesticides in their gardens and yards. Helen, One of the great joys of being out in the garden is my enjoyment of all the little creatures out there with me. Sometimes the skinks do startle me in early spring, but I'd rather have them in the garden than have the venomous snakes. Turtles provide a surprising amount of pest control too, though turtles are less common in my garden than frogs and toads, which are simply everywhere. Every year we do have a turtle or two live in the garden and eat potato bugs. It is the easiest method of Colorado Potato Beetle control I've ever used. Susan, I haven't seen one in several years, so I am hoping that horrible summer was an aberration. Neighbors within a mile of us saw some last year, but they are significantly closer to the river so they always have more wildlife than we do. Venomous snakes also haven't been as bad in 2011 and 2012 as they were prior to that. I still see them, but mostly I've seen the water moccasins move into the lily pond after the local native creeks and ponds dry up, and haven't seen as many copperheads as usual. The timber rattler population seems unchanged, but I only encounter them maybe 4 or 5 times a year. I hate having the venomous snakes around, but suspect we'll have just as many 20 years from now as we have now. Actually, out here in the rural areas we need snakes and lots of them or we'd be totally overrun by field mice, voles, pocket gophers, etc. It is just that I don't want the venomous snakes in the yard or garden where they might bite a person or domestic pet. They can roam roughly 13 acres of our property however, whenever or wherever they please, but if the venomous snakes are found on the acre or acre and a half nearest the house, we shoot them. Dawn

“LONG post. Looking for advice from folks who have lots of experience with medium scale worm breeding and casting production” Most of us here do smaller scale. “I can already tell that much of the advice out there is like the advice on regular composting - easiest case advice that has been reprinted enough times that certain things become 'consensus' thus must be true.” The same thing happens here. Since you are asking questions about things we may not have experience with, expect more of that kind of advice. “the advice out there that says a worm population will double in 90 days is silly - under ideal conditions they could increase 100 fold in that time period.” The WEIGHT of the worm population can double every 90 days. The numbers will more than double, but many of the new worms will be babies. “My assumption is that the fastest way to get a large population going is to master the right conditions and then to have very low density. IE, a pound of worms in one bin is not going to yield the same population in three months as will the same pound of worms spread across 2,4, or 8 bins.” I have no idea how you come to that conclusion. Worms only breed so fast. Separating them from potential partners does not speed up the process. You want to avoid overcrowding the worms, but one pound in the kind of bin you describe is far from overcrowding. “Is there a minimum number you experienced breeders have found to be the minimum effective dose to ensure worms are finding one another and doing the horizontal worm mambo” Two. “or have these suckers been around a few million years because if there are two they will track one another down and ensure the survival of the species?” I don’t know if anyone here has really researched that, but conventional wisdom says that if your population is not dense enough, you will have less breeding. “For Bins, I am building continuous flow through bins using plastic garbage pails since they are cheap and large.” But are not strong enough to hold the weight of the VC, especially if you have cut a hole in the bottom large enough to facilitate harvesting. Bins made the way you describe tend to collapse under the weight of the VC “I figured the cranked spinning bar would likely just dig a groove above the grate and require some hand loosening anyway” That has been my experience. “I was thinking I'd use 'unfinished' hot compost. By unfinished, I mean it has been turned a couple times and there are still identifiable chunks like leaves that are blackened but largely whole.” This would make great bedding. If your hot compost has a balance of C to N, it would also be great food, and would require no additional food. “Am I right that unfinished compost, so long as it doesn't heat up is more or less perfect and would spur breeding since it would represent a mountain of perfect food source and stay pretty constant in terms of temp and moisture level with minimal effort?” Probably. “Food: I will quickly have more worms than I will have food scraps suitable for feeding them,” You are being optimistic. You may be right, but there can be a lot of surprises when you are raising live animals. “One of my favorite composting ingredients is to get coffee grounds in mass quantity from the coffee shops” This is not ideal worm food. Perhaps you would do better to put it in your hot bins and precompost it. “I have read that too many coffee grounds are bad for worms due to acidity.” A lot of people say that. I don’t buy it. “Is there another reason they would be bad?” Besides that worms don’t like to eat them until they have decomposed a bit? “I don't want to make feeding the worms a full time job so if I get sufficient numbers I know a nursery that will sell a truckload of horse stall compost cheap.” That may be the answer to getting them to breed faster as well. “It's a tad warm usually but I'm thinking that spreading an inch on top of the bins and lightly watering it would prevent heating and I've read that there is no better food for feeding compost worms and getting them to breed/mature quickly?” Correct, and correct.

Rebecca, Congrats on the Big Beefs! Any day that the dewpoint starts that high usually is not a good day. We 'almost' had a good day yesterday. Our dewpoint started high like yours but slowly fell all day long. Unfortunately I guess it didn't fall far enough fast enough. Our forecast said our max heat index would be 102 (compared to the previous day's 110) but they were wrong---it still hit 106. Still, 106 was better than 110. To me, when the overnight low is 80 or above, that's also a bad sign, and we've already had that this week too, though it is more common for nights in late July or early August to stay that hot. Jennifer, I agree. These hot nights aren't giving us much of a break. With fall tomatoes, I prefer to get them planted in late June or no later than the first week of July. Mid-June is even better. You want the plants to be large and in bloom when the daytime highs fall back into the right range for fruit set. Exactly when that happens will vary from year to year, but often it happens for much of the state around mid-August when the early August heat rampage breaks. My experience is that most people in OK plant them too late and don't get a lot of ripe fruit from them for that reason. Beans do not produce well in heat, and often do not produce at all in the heat. That is why we plant them so early here (April, and at my end of the state, in late March in a warm Spring)---we have to beat that heat. They drop blossoms without setting beans once the temperatures get up into the 90s and stay there consistently. The time to plant pole beans for fall production would be mid-July and the time to plant bush beans for fall production would be around August 10. Spider mites also are a big issue on bean plants in hot weather, which is another reason that beans don't do well as a hot weather crop here. If you like to grow Lima beans, I have found that they produce much better in the heat than snap beans do. We have had frosts as early as the end of September some years, but I don't think that has happened in a long time. It did happen our first year here.....and is another reason I have invested all that money in floating row covers. You can cover up your fall crops on the night of the first 1 or 2 freezes and often that's all you have to do---just get them through that first oddly cold night or two and then we'll have another 4-6 weeks of warm weather during which time your plants will be producing like gangbusters in autumn's milder weather. I didn't do much in the garden yesterday, just harvested enough bush beans to put up three pints in the freezer, and harvested more tomatoes (an everyday thing at this point). I've been staying busy on these hot afternoons processing the produce for fresh eating or freezing or canning so that nothing piles up too much and becomes an insurmountable mountain of produce that I dread processing. I don't think I'll do anything garden-related today. I need a day off, and I need to go to the store and run errands and all that stuff. Plus, there's rain in the forecast although our chances for today are really low. I think our big rain here won't come until Sunday night, possibly in the overnight hours. Our local TV met showed us the predictor model he uses and it showed the rain getting here really late, and he said he didn't believe it and thought it was 'off' and that we'd likely see rain 6 or 7 hours earlier than the predictor said. That would be Sunday evening and not Monday morning like the predictor model was showing. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll harvest whatever tomatoes are at the breaker stage or beyond, and any other produce that is ready. That way I'll at least get everything up into the house before the rain comes again to try to ruin the tomato flavor and make them all crack. Summer rain is the enemy of our tomato fruit, unfortunately. Have a great Saturday, everyone, and stay cool. Dawn