Perhaps I didn't read this right, but didn't you just wash the urine (ammonia) off the manure?

I wish I had the book at hand about ammonia and nitrogen.
Since Buck is pouring his green tea on wood chips, which "eat" nitrogen,
any chance this could work as a nutrient for microbes in the soil ?

He writes he's using it as mulch on top of the gound, not near roots. Right ?
Ostensibly worms can tolerate fresh rabbit manure, though some wormers recommend keeping the urine separate, as I recall.

If all this is Art, call him Jackson Pollock.

The wood chips are fairly old and rotted. They are essentially dirt-like, with some crumbly chip-shaped remnants. I mostly use these as mulch to conserve water, but the fine crumbly parts settle to the mulch/soil interface and become the organic component in a new layer of soil. When I rip up a plant that has had this type of mulch on it, most of the roots are in the crumbly layer above the old soil. This is because this layer is essentially a sponge that holds a reserve of water and nutrients while my soil is a poor quality sandy clay. After applying this rotted mulch, I want to rinse the fine bits down and settle them out quickly, but I don't want to wash the nutrients out with plain water and starve the plant. Thus, I'm always looking for dozens of gallons of biologically active liquid fertilizer to water my mulched plants with.

While wood is a poor conductor of heat, younger wood chips impressively keep the sun from drying out the dirt quickly. Most of the moisture is still in the area just under the chips, where there is little fertile topsoil in my yard. Without the fine, spongy, rotten wood particle layer on top of the dirt, there is little capacity to hold nutrients for the plants, which will be filling this area with hungry roots.

When rinsing the rabbit manure, it is not simply urine and salts being rinsed off, just like when rinsing ground coffee beans there is more than just caffeine being rinsed off. Water is called the universal solvent because there are so many things that readily dissolve in it. Urine is just one of them.

I'm generally on the lookout for liquids that can soak this root filled sponge layer with fertility, and the solids in manure tend to stay on top of the mulch. When the manure is on top of the mulch, it becomes the mulch and doesn't act as manure.

I'm hoping that this green tea method will fill several needs. So far, it seems that it will give these 10 benefits:

1) Feeds and waters worm bin
2) Hastens the physical breakdown of rabbit manure pellets
3) Removes excess nutrients and ammonia smell from worm bin
4) Removes excess salt buildup from worm bin, while rinse water and rain will further dilute and prevent buildup
5) Increases rinsate quantity as well as fertilization quality
6) Removes solids that are unhelpful on top of soil/mulch
7) Keeps solids in bin for worms to break down without time consuming sifting or worm disruption
8) Liquid result is fine enough that it will not clog the holes in my watering can spout
9) Using the worm bin as a filter blends microorganisms into the liquid while blending manure into the worm bin

10. Rapid, high quality, conversion from solid waste to inoculated liquid fertilizer product with limited time and effort

Your worm system sounds great. Nice list of benefits. I am sure your rinsate is good stuff.

How big is your system? How do you prevent the drain from plugging up?

Good luck!

The worm bin is an oval 110 Gallon rubber tub. It is supported off of the ground on the two ends with wooden blocks so that it bends a little in the middle under the weight. There are about 6-8 small holes drilled in the center of the bottom of the tub for drainage. The holes are about 1/8" each.

The water just goes through the material in the bin at its own pace and drips into a water heater pan that sits under it. The pan is plumbed via 1" PVC and drips into a 5 Gallon bucket for collection.

When I originally set up the bin, I put 2" of pine bark chips on the bottom and a thick layer of newspaper on top of that. When I finally dug down to the bottom of the bin this summer after 2-1/2 years of worming in it, I didn't see any indication that wood chips or newspaper was there.

I think there is little issue with it clogging because I only give the bin 5-10 gallons of water at a time and I just leave the bucket there to collect liquid as it drains, rather than expecting the output to immediately match the input. The water may take 10 or so minutes to start draining from the bin after a watering, and will usually have a fast flow rate of a few hours, then over the next day the rate will decrease to a slow drip. The slow drip continues as long as there are wet things breaking down in the bin.

I like the word "rinsate". Do you do this every couple of months?

When my collection bucket is filled with liquid, I use it. If I want to use it and there isn't enough juice, then I'll give the bin a good rinsing.

If I do this too much for the amount of food that I've been feeding the worms, the rinsate gets weaker and weaker. Now that I've found the potential instant payoff of adding manure, I'm back up to full strength juice or greater for several buckets in a day.

Of course, I don't trust that passing manure water through a foot or so of mud is guaranteed to remove every potential pathogen, and I wouldn't recommend spraying it on vegetables as-is. I'm a pour man though, and I feel that pouring the filtered manure around plants is at least as safe as placing solid manure.