Happy winter worms

If you have read any of my Verma compost posts this year, my poor worms have really been through it. This spring my boys accidentally dropped a tree limb on my worm bin which is a plastic bin, so it broke the lid and cracked the bin in several places. They forgot to tell me, and it rained quite a bit. When I went to feed them a discovered a soggy mess.
I moved them to the greenhouse because I didn't have time to make a new bin. They eventually had a good moisture level.
Summer came and I we had a very busy and super stressful time. At some point I realized I was assentualy cooking my worms in the greenhouse.
I still didn't have time to make a new bin, so I found a shady spot, made sure a fed them and kept them moist.
This fall I finally made a new worm bin. I didn't expect to have many worms, I certainly didn't deserve them. Surprisingly there were quite a few worms.  They were small, and not very active, but they were alive.
I have been keeping  them watered and feeding them, but the food is lasting a long time, and I didn't see hardly any worms. I decided to put it back in the greenhouse (I will have to make sure I take it out in April). It's unheated so the temperature  is around 65 to 75 degrees during the day. Yesterday  I checked to see if they needed to be fed. They didn't, but I saw lots of nice sized active worms. The food is lasting a long time probably because it's a pretty new bin, so there's lots of bedding to process, as well as the "food".  
It shows how tough, and resilient worms are. With all those poor things went through, and are now thriving again. I'm definitely going to make sure I'm a better care taker to my worms, they certainly deserve it.

Worms are incredibly resilient!

What I've found to increase their numbers the fastest is 1.) Feeding/bedding on top of the bin and 2.) Misting them.  

I think the mist and the feed on top really keep them reproducing.

What kind of worms do you have?  We raise red wigglers and european night crawlers.

My greenhouse bin solution was an old plastic cooler placed in a raised bed. Seems to address the temp changes winter to summer.

Most of my worms are red wigglers. My son used jumbo red worms for fishing, and had some left. I put them in my bin.
I work at a Co-op, and when the guy who brings our worms for fishing cooler came I asked if the red wigglers were the same as the ones used for vermicompost. He said they were the same. He also told me the jumbo red were great for vermicompost as well, so that's why I added them.  Maybe if they breed a bigger worm they will compost a little faster. Also once the population increases my son can take a hand a handful of my worms instead of having to buy them.