TLDR: Habituated Worms are worm bins fully populated with worms of all ages – adult, juvies, babies, and cocoons. These worm bins have never been sifted off of vermicompost or worms or shaken about except for the minimal top-most layer to replace the bento food box and the “love-board” (reproduction stimulating cardboard). The bins are built to stay untouched/un-aggravated for about 2 months. This method of growing worms makes the worms habituated and ready to produce cocoons as the population decreases.
However, without sifting the worms and vermicompost, how can we assess the health and population in the bin. The solution is to “sample and observe”. If you have many habituated worm bins, always observe (and measure as possible – count/weight) how many worms are in or under the bento box, and under or over the love-board whenever feeding. Your observation serves as a “mental” measurement of how much population there are based on what you can see.
There are more worms where you cannot see. This is the second step of the population count process – the extraction process. It is when you can safely assume that the worm bin has a lot of worms in it based on how many times you have “sampled” the feed/love area. Now, the worm bin has to be extracted of vermicompost, sift off the worms to get a more accurate count and weight. Note that you will miss all the cocoons, babies, and juvenile worms, just the teenage and adult worms will be easily viewable. You must record your findings; the “sample” observation results per feeding, the feeding rate and the extraction count. Do not do this process again, as this is only done just once assuming your feeding behavior and climate conditions are consistent.
Habituation is used in the tildePSL worm bin design. The tildePSL design uses a grocery bag in which water can seep through, and therefore, to extract the vermicompost tea, the bin is just showered with water, no need to extract the vermicompost.
And then again, there is a chance that the bin can become overpopulated. Overpopulation halts the reproduction cycle. To prevent this from happening, based on your “sample and observe” step, remove the majority of worms you can see, weigh/count the worms, then place them in a new tildePSL worm bin. The assumption is that for a 1 square foot size area of worm bin, you should be able to populate the bin with a maximum of 2000 worms. If the “sample and observe” count/weight plus the extraction step process count/weight is roughly about the maximum population of 2000 worms (2 lbs.) then it is time to split the bin.
! Splitting the bin is not sifting off the worms again! It means removing the “sample and observe” worms from the source bin and making a new tildePSL worm bin, until you reach about 1000 worms in the new bin. Note that the population in the new bin will have to be minimal to induce worm reproduction, hence self-repopulation. And as you remove and under-populate the source bin, the worms keep repopulating for you. This is how everyone should grow a worm farm – a never-ending eternal worm bin for your never-ending garden amendment and never-ending food waste.
There will come a time when you just have so many that you cannot keep up with the feeding effort/time, or the amount of vermicompost is more than you need. That is the time you can extract the worms and vermicompost to sell or use in your own garden as toppings. But using vermicompost as topping is not the best way to use your hard-earned effort. The bacteria on vermicompost when used as topping will die off much faster than if you would apply the vermicompost tea that you can make out of your extracted vermicompost. Rather, make a huge vermicomposting tea brewer so that you can also amend your trees, shrubs and lawn with vermicompost amendments, not just your plants. To learn more about vermicomposting tea, come back for more articles. I will write down my vermicomposting and soil regeneration secrets as more vermifidelis requests it. Send me a message for more.
I have habituated worms for sale. There is only a few, and therefore, will be in auction, starting at a minimum price value. The price is inexpensive and I only ask a good Yelp review as a return.
Visit the Buy Now – Habituated tildePSL Worm Bin to check out. The value of the worm bin is more than the effort of making a bin from scratch and the time it takes for you to immediately start. Remember, these worm bins are readily available for vermicompost tea extraction, since these have been habituated for 2 months.
“The solution to the food shortage is to grow your own food in the household, just like how it is done before industrialization began. You can grow an unlimited supply of a single kind of vegetable, and with bartering you can swap your extra vegetable with someone else’s extra vegetable.”
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