Our worms are very spoilt, they have a ranch. We and our neighbors on both sides feed them. Even our dogs feed them. They reward us with piles of worm doo-doo along the edge of the driveway. This is my 'compost' zone, in the middle is a small open bottom box that is our kitchen scraps bin. All around in this shady area is where I dump leaves, twigs, grass clippings. Pine needles and podocarpus leaves drop a lot. Periodically I'll lay down some cardboard, an old cotton rug or heavy towel - then cover with leaves. The worms love it. We also bury our dogs land mines. We dig a hole, but you could also do some sort of wire mesh thingie I suppose. At any rate, add a doggie doo pile and a scoop of pine flakes bedding. When the hole gets near full, fill in the top with soil/sand. Your worms will love you more. Our one neighbor came over one afternoon during one of our consecutive freezing nights and asked me what the smoke/steam was she saw when she left for work in the morning. I laughed and pointed out our kitchen compost 'bin' with various plants sitting on top to keep them warm. It gets very hot inside there but the worms don't seem to mind. ~dianne

Hi Gina, adding to organic louie's reply, if your tray is full and you still see lots of bedding and food scraps, that means the worms haven't processed it yet. You still have several months to go to get that 1 tray finished. I also have a WF that I started on Dec.9/08 with 1.5 lb of worms. I didn't check if there are really as many worms as 1.5lb I am still on my first tray and it is still full of bedding and scraps. It is starting to get established though. I suspect that the original worms (many of them) have died in the process of getting established. I find that the WF does not let enough air through because in the beginning I have leachete(?spelling)in the bottom tray and a good working bin should not have it. Also because I found worms (not many, just about 5/day for almost a month)in that catch tray. That problem stopped since I do not drop the working tray completely into the catch tray. I shift and let the bottom of the working tray rest on the side of the catch tray so air can get into the catch tray. I also do not use the lid. I upended an extra tray and use it as a lid and covered it with weed cloth to prevent fruit flies and others getting in. The worms get fed scraps that have been frozen before so I won't be bringing unwanted eggs from outside. I also use TP-cores as chimneys burried at least halfway into the bedding. It seems to be working much better now and the worms seem to be much alert. However, I am still feeding only once a week and maybe only 1/2lb of scraps. I don't know how many worms I now have in the tray munching (too slow for my taste). Maybe that is due to my continuous checking and prodding. Now I am down to ONLY 2x/day of peeking. I suspect the ones working in my tray are the 2. generation. The freezer has more wormfood than people food. Otis

I don't know why he has them in a container either. Unless it is what sbryce said. :-) Even WITH a container I find that a tiny percent of the worms insist on living on the floor along with a tiny percent of my finished vermicompost. A reason to divide a bin is in case conditions mysteriously go bad in one bin the second will hopefully avoid catastrophy and get you quickly back in business. An 8 gallon bin handles my household most of the time. I figure my 5 gallon finishing bucket is my back up. Although it will have only a very few baby worms. I have that much only because vermicomposting got to be so much fun I had no interest in planting anything! On the rare occasion I will double my cubic footage due to a very temporary watermellon or pumpkin emergency. This also uses up all my cardbord supplies. In a few weeks it has melted down enough to fit into my regular bin. The biggest thing I use to determine when to split a bin is when I have an overwhelming urge to play with the worms.

How long before they multiply? How long is a piece of string? It depends ... I'd say 3 months is the best guess you can make. So long as there is adequate food and ideal conditions it will happen naturally. I read an interesting article that talked about how in a natural environment, worm will tend to increase the number of cocoons being deposited as conditions fluctuate as a method of preserving the species. ie as a manure pile becomes consumed or dries out they would deposit cocoons like crazy with the intention of ensuring that there is a large next generation some time in the future. Would be a neat experiment to have two bins with identical bedding, number of worms, etc. Keep one maintained as you would normally as a base to measure against. The other, allowed to cycle between sopping wet and then dried out and sopping wet again and so on. It would stand to reason that the first dry out cycle would cause the deposition of worms and the wetting cause the 'hatching'. If the wetting happens before the adult worms dry out and die than you would have a larger population than the natural cycle had intended, thus more worms to be depositing cocoons and so on. Now after writing it, I think I want to try it.