Did quite a lot of sorting out of my worm farm today. I had one bucket that I’d started about 3 months ago and hadn’t really paid all the much attention to lately due to a MTB accident (broken collar bone which kinda kept me out of action for a while).
Anyway, I picked up such a great bumper crop of vermicompost that I was really quite chuffed with the result. Mostly what I was chuffed with was the harvesting method. I’ve always been quite disappointed with how inefficient and time consuming harvesting the compost is. Usually I simply dumping the contents of the bin on a plastic sheet and wait for the worms to burrow down a bit. I generally wait about 5 minutes and then each 5 minutes scrape a thin layer of compost off the top of the pile. (For those of you not up to speed with the idea behind this type of harvesting, worms don’t like light and actively try to avoid it by burrowing down away from it. So in this case, all you need to do is make sure that you’re outside and not harvesting your compost at night 
and you’ll be good to go.) The nice thing that I noticed was that I can improve the efficiency and productivity of the process by waiting longer between rounds of scraping off the worm-semi-free compost from the top of the pile. I waited up to 1/2 an hour between each effort and ended up being able to finish the entire job doing only 4 sets of harvesting and each effort only took about 5 minutes or so with minimal need to separate stray worms from the harvested VC. All in all, very happy with my new batch of black gold.
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