If I leave the chicken house in winter with sixteen eggs, three of them dirty and no customers, I will heave three said eggs toward compost 20 feet away from plowed driveway. I always hope to shoot them through the mesh, but sometimes I get a high fly going on, and the egg lands somehow unscathed in the center of the pile. Now that I've experienced popping into a seventh month old egg, I'm more likely to specifically aim for the egg with my pitchfork during the next turning. Here's how many undesirable eggs I will put in my compost per year: eggs I don't want to eat or sell + any other eggs I don't want to eat or sell = eggs in my compost

I thought I should post an update about my worm progress. There are still some white egg-looking things, but many seem to have dried up. I got a magnifying glass and looked at them for a while. A few of them started moving after a while, so I think they ARE mites of some kind. I wiped most of them off the sides with a damp paper towel, and now there are fewer of them each time I wipe. We did get fruit flies, but not from the worm bin. I brought home a pineapple that was infested, and they just love my fruit-filled house. A few of them found the worm bin, but it has not been the major problem. I changed our routine so that fruit gets processed (into applesauce, or per butter, or jam etc) as soon as it is brought home. Fruit for eating goes in the fridge. Dried fruit is in sealed mason jars. No more ripening fruit sitting around. I also set out some cider-vinegar fruit fly traps, which are slowly helping. All my produce scraps now go outside in a bucket on the porch. I will bury them when the ground is workable. The worm bin itself seems healthy. The oldest bedding, food, and cardboard seems to be compost now. The new bedding I added is decomposing. When I stir it up, I find lots of healthy-looking worms in action. There are also other teeny organisms that look interesting. but nothing in over-supply. No bad smells, not too much mold, no leakage from the drain holes. I plan to get more worms, add a few to this first box, and start a second (maybe third) bin. We do produce a lot of veg scraps. Just today, we produced four banana skins, a winter squash rind, two pear peels, pepper trimmings, leftover rice, three tea bags, and some carrot peels. And I didn't even can anything!

Because you have done so much research on your own you were able to ask excellent questions. I feel I should really try to give you the best answers I can. Due to vacation maybe don't buy your worms until after June. But that is a very long time to ask someone to put off getting worms. Plus by then the July heat will do them no good in a mail box. Look around to see if you can find any for free locally in maybe even your own yard or a damp, composty area. You may need a two prong approach as far as indoors or outdoors. You may need to keep a small population indoors all year round. This will allow you to replace if summer heat does in the outdoor ones. Put it somewhere not on a carpet. When playing with the worms with the little one make sour lemon faces so at least the worms will be on the floor and not in the mouth. Egg carton cardboard or similar and corrigated cardboard are water absorbant and create air space. Not bleached white office paper, although some find sucess with it so I am almost afraid to dis it. To solve your distance from the bottom of the container do it yourself I expect a poster who smartly used 5 gallon buckets and trimmed them for various depths as spacers to chime in. Being in hot Texas I can not recommend various cloth vermicomposting methods. Find some massive double shade (a huge tree next to a house) where maybe an air conditioner drips onto to locate your bin outdoors. Maybe start out the first week on a north side porch? and open the cover every day and let the two year old dig in 24/7 for a week or so? After a while it will not be so interesting. If BSFL do well then maybe they will do your composting for you. People seem to love them just as much as we love our worms. In Texas I do not think you can just throw them in a box and forget them. I'm only very rude when a first time poster is in no way legit and their first, second, third, and fourth post tries to spam the board and sell us something giving zero in useful information in return. :-) I was also very mean to the two? doctoral students? who wanted us to write their papers for them. Or the student who wanted to kill all the evil worms that infested his perfectly built for worms water purification system. Oh and to the guy who thought it was evil to add $$$biochar to make castings blacker. Luckily, the other posters on the board are very, very nice and make up for me :-)

For what it's worth, I think a rotational system with associated rotational harvesting is a good idea, BUT... one would have to have the room for all of the bins. This is an excellent concept for mathematical modeling. That is not to suggest that such modeling would represent broad-scale reality, but rather that one could get an idea of the elements that would need 'focus'. For example: If you wanted to start your rotating system with 26 'bins', and you wanted to harvest on a two-week interval and you wanted to start harvesting in 2 weeks after start up, you would need 26 lbs of worms. That's a lot of worms. At $25 per pound - a common rate for a pound of worms - that's $650 start up costs just for the worms. If on the other hand, you wanted to start with one pound of worms, but end up with 26 bins, each with one pound of worms "working", then you would have to take the surplus from the first bin and put it in the second bin. If you got half a pound of worms in two weeks from an initial one pound, it would take four weeks to get the second bin to 1 pound of worms. (However, since you'd be adding worms at two weeks from the first bin, the time to get to one pound would be shorter. However, since you were only harvesting at two week intervals, you have a "discrete" component, and your rotational cycle would be constrained by that discrete component.) Then, you'd have two bins, each with one pound of worms producing half a pound of worms every two weeks so the third bin could have one pound of worms only one week after the second bin had its one pound of worms. THEN, the fourth bin would be started, and once it was 'cooking', you could start adding multiple bins at each two week interval. Hence the mathematical modeling comment. As with all models - mathematical and otherwise - there are critical elements. The most important of which are: 1) "initial conditions" - like how many bins are you starting with, 2) "production per unit time" - like the half a pound of worms per week. 3) "harvest of surplus" - how many are going to be harvested - not put back in the system - per interval of time. And so on... Again, I'm NOT suggesting that the output of such a model would represent reality for every wormer, but rather that the exercise could inform one of the significant components and, once those factors were known (empirically), what would happen in the system if/when hose factors were changed. Such a model would likely have a very narrow scope of application as there are so many factors that effect worm production. Unless one was willing - and able - to reproduce the exact conditions and procedures under which the model was developed, it is unlikely that the model would 'translate' to other locales and "systems". The original post was quite some time ago, and the topic has drifted a bit. Shouldn't this be a new thread? Paul