I saw on a couple forums that people had mentioned being able cultivate PNSBs from worm castings. I don't know if that applies to the majority of PNSBs or just a few. In any case, the one I'm most interested in for harvesting and culturing to inoculate a more em-1-like serum would be Rhodopseudomonas palustris, whose versatility allows it to be found in aerobic and anaerobic conditions. "The presence of photosynthetic bacteria along with the heterotrophic bacteria have been reported in various aquatic environments like Indian tropical waters (Vasavi et al., 2007), salt marshes (Bergstein et al., 1993), industrial effluents (Ramasamy et al., 1990; Merugu et al., 2008), sea water (Kobayashi,1982), sewage (Kobayashi et al., 1995), waste water (Sunita and Mitra, 1993 and Vasavi et al., 2007), hot water springs (Demchick et al., 1990), earthworm casts (Vasavi et al., 2007), paddy fields (Sasikala et al., 2004), ocean waters and aquaculture (Kappler et al.,2005), brackish lagoon (Anthony et al., 2006), and black sea (Overmann and Manske, 2006)." (PDF of Biotechnological Applications Of Purple Non Sulphur Phototrophic Bacteria: A Minireview) Maybe I won't be able to find it in a worm bin with Eisenia fetida, though... I'd just hit up a swamp, but all the swamps 'round here are frozen at the moment. Well, I don't know too much about this stuff right now anyway, so maybe I'll just do more reading and just use commercial EM-1 or LAB to compost my bokashi to feed to my worms (or freeze) for now. By the time springs rolls round, maybe I'll know enough to culture and add a few PNSBs. Btw, any good studies out there comparing the efficacy of EM-1 vs LAB for bokashi? (Only thing I seem to remember is that the PNSBs in the EM-1 consume the CO2 the LAB creates so maybe that's something significant...)

Hi Dave. i dont know much but from what i have seen and been reading about. could you dig as deep as you can in your flower beds and berry a plastic tube of about 6" / 8" dia. drill holes up it's length stopping about 6 or so inches from the top. place a cap on the top end and leave sticking out of the ground a bit. drop some mushed up veg in the bottom with a layer of hay straw or paper shreds or sawdust. as you would a compost toilet. the holes around the tube and the veg much will encourage worms to enter the tube and will help break down the poo. depending on the size of your flower beds you could alternate with putting poo in them which might give the worms time to work there magic. any goodness the worms make will leach out into the surrounding area and should give your lnts the boost you are looking for.

I can't agree that I don't really "care" what they eat. I'm certainly not trying to turn this into a full-fledged debate (not that I would ever get offended by having one unless someone get's offensive during it), but if I'm going to undertake any kind of 'project' (especially one that consists of playing with moldy, smelly 'waste' on a regular basis - LOL), regardless of my reasoning for doing so, I like to edumacate myself as much as possible on the information surrounding the particular subject so I can be the 'best' I can be at it. I guess I'm just the sort of person that likes continuously learning new things in as much depth as possible and strives for some extent of excellence in all areas of my life... whatever those may be. That said, I originally got into composting (as a whole) for several reasons. First and foremost, I started my first garden last year, and decided to go totally organic/non-GMO. In that quest, I began composting... primarily for soil addendum due to what I've been dealt by nature in my yard, but also, as a positive byproduct, to reduce my household's overall 'footprint' in some way (no matter how small). So for me, vermicomposting is not just a 'hobby', but I'm actually concerned about the end result and/or finished product, which is why threads such as these interest me. Bottom line (for me), I just want to understand what I can about the topic as a whole, and perhaps, eventually, figure out what is, indeed, "fact", and what is "faith". Unfortunately, I'll never be able to travel down the gut (not that I'd probably survive the gizzard) of one of my worms and see the process firsthand, so I will have to take a few things on "faith" that I read along the way... but despite that limitation, I am certainly not above discussing if what I have read, wherever, is commonly accepted in "faith" by others more experienced than me. All that clarified, I will at this point agree with certain things discussed here: 1) Worms do 'eat' bacteria, but not ONLY bacteria (which is what I initially assumed you were saying in your first post) 2) They do NOT 'eat' anything that is not broken down into "RTE" 'food' 3) Everything organic can and will eventually break down into RTE form Now given #3, horse manure may indeed be a better IMMEDIATE food (or more readily accepted) than non-RTE substitutes, but does that necessarily make it "better" for the end product... the castings? Not saying it does or doesn't (as I honestly don't know with any certainty at this point), and since the worms obviously like it (whether in captivity or the wild), I can only assume (or take on "faith", as I've yet to feed mine any) that it is, in fact, "good" in some sense of the word. Then again, in their natural habitat, there is rarely the opportunity for them to encounter what we feed them from our kitchens, so it's also possible they simply migrate to whatever is available. Either way, I am still not sure that the topic of the thread has been fully determined, however... and unless that is eventually accomplished here, why are we bothering to waste valuable hours of our days writing about (and purely speculating on) it?

harry57, "The beauty of doing bokashi is that the material can remain fermenting in the bucket for long periods of time until you're ready to use it." Exactly! It IS beautiful! "smell a bit whiffy" bokashi is a pickling process, well not as in a salt pickling process, but similar results. I think bokashi made from meat, cabbage, radish, manure, or rose pedals should in theory all smell the same. I hope to catch your posts on bokashi burying in the Earth Machine. Maybe toss a couple pieces of biochar... Cowboy Brand Charcoal... the chaff or small pieces and dust would not be missed from the primo stuff. "Earth Machine" does material Really flow through that? How hard is it to harvest? Is it possible to only harvest stuff that was put in the front and the material on the bottom in the back just lives there forever landlocked? Hmmmm. If I was using an "Earth Machine" to finish bokashi I would dump the bucket into the top. Then there would be a choice of materials to top off with. Any of the carbon materials ever mentioned on any composting board including vermicomposting. Garden soil is an option. Poor soil. Bokashi is a moist material. Hmmmmm. Sounds like lots of fun options.