I wanted to share my recent experience to hopefully help other vermicomposting newbies! Hopefully this doesn't come across as too "dumb"; I thought worms would be super easy to keep but turns out they can be a little picky.
I ordered 4000 composting worms from Uncle Jim's worm farm with the intention of using roughly half of them for our composting toilet and keeping the other half for an indoor vermicomposting system. This is my second order from them. The first order was 2000, 3/4 of them went into the composting toilet (which was not enough for us), rest stayed in my 5 gallon bucket system. We experienced failures in BOTH systems (long story, I might create another post about it later), so that's why I had to order more.
My worms came in on June 21st and I put them into my 5 gallon worm bucket with the coconut coir they came in, a good amount amount of soggy recycled paper (I made sure it's not too wet), plus some canteloupe from our garden. Once the canteloupe was gone, I added a banana peel, and it was eaten up relatively quickly since there are so many worms. Everything seemed fine until about June 30th when I started noticing dead worms on the surface of the substrate, covered in soil mites. From everything I read, soil mites are mostly not a problem unless they start to outcompete with the worms for food. I do not think there were enough mites to create that problem. My intention was NOT to keep the full 4000 worms in the bucket for as long as I did, but I was in a biking accident on June 18th and got a severe concussion plus separated my left AC joint, so I was barely functioning by the time my husband drove us to get the worms on the 21st.
When I found the roughly 15 dead worms on June 30th, I started reading about it and thought, "maybe they need more substrate", so I got some soil and added it to their bucket.
I checked on the worms about 3 times a day, finding about 5 dead worms every time I checked the bucket, until Sunday the 3rd.
My next hope was that maybe they were too dry, so I added some moisture on Saturday the 2nd, but I still continued to find dead worms.
Most of the worms had mild disfiguration, so the final conclusion is that the worms had protein poisoning/string of pearls from the soil being too acidic. None of my worms looked quite as bad as the worms in pictures of protein poisoning, so I thought *maybe* it was something else, but ultimately I believe this is what was killing my worms. I do not have soil pH test strips, so I won't know for certain, but I completely changed the substrate in their bucket and have had no more deaths. The only thing I can assume is that some of the food I left in the bucket fermented, causing the system to fall out of balance.
Sunday the 3rd I decided to completely start over so I didn't lose any more worms. I started by thouroughly cleaning a new bucket and putting in a mixture of moistened coconut coir and wood shavings. My intention for the separation process was to get half in the 5 gallon bucket system, not really too concerned with soil mites hitch hiking into the new system, and half into a temporary container where I would "bathe" the worms as thouroughly as possible to transfer into our composting toilet.
I made the poor choice to dump the worms out onto the studio floor and separate them by hand. A lot of worms were balled together (another indiciation there was something wrong with their substrate), so I was easily able to plop them into the new bucket/washing bucket. It took me about 3.5 hours to completely sort through it and find all the living worms plus ONE cocoon (yay!). I decided to sort through them in my studio because I live in Florida so using a hose outside is not an option this time of year - I will get eaten alive by mosquitos.
It is now 2 days later and the worms in the indoor bucket system seem very happy, no clumping together. The worms in the composting toilet are also very happy.
Hopefully this can help others who are new to having red wigglers who might experience problems with new composting systems.
