I [heart] Davids It helps me to say these things aloud, I think.

Saturday I spent about 7 hours harvesting my worm bins. I tried out the new harvester-screener that Sean and I had built. Here are my thoughts about the screener:

• Castings need to be fairly dry for this to work well. I found I could achieve a good level of dryness by leaving the bins out in the sun for a little while before screening them.
• The outside dimension of the screener was good because it fit nicely over the Rubbermaid collection tub.
• I would like a smaller screening area. The wide screening area provided just too much room and seemed to make a larger mess.
• I would like higher sides – again, I found myself making a mess because worm dirt kept bouncing over the sides when I shook the screener.

Sean found that the screener worked pretty well, but I think part of the reason is that he doesn’t give the worms as much “challenging” food as I do. I had plenty of undigested paperboard, squash seeds, and the woody parts of vegetables.

The other part of this story is that I decided, once I got started, that the best way to tackle my fruit fly infestation would be to start my bins over. So, I needed to separate my worms from everything, not just the castings.

I wound up with about two pounds of recovered worms from all my bins plus one pound of worms for Jenny. That doesn’t count all the worms that didn’t get separated. I have an 18 gallon Rubbermaid that is about 1/3 full of beautiful, rich castings, and another 18 gallon Rubbermaid that is about half full of partially composted food and who knows how many worms. Lastly, I have a small kitchen garbage bag about half full of partially composted food, lots of shredded paper, and more unharvested worms. I am hoping that Jenny can take this bag because I think she has a compost pile. Otherwise, it goes in the trash.

Once I harvested everything, I used the hose to pressure wash all of the parts of the bins very well. I started two new bins with lots of newly shredded, fluffy paper and half of the worms in each bin. I started both my Worm Factory bin and the OSCR Jr style bin.

My clever buddy Sean and I were interested in buying or building a harverster for our worm bins. We debated buying this expensive tumbler harvester and splitting the cost, but we were reluctant.

Then I got feedback from Travis on the Worm Bin Board. Here are his comments:
I have one of the first “mini harvesters”, I don’t like it very much. Think about what you want it to do for you. The reason I don’t like it, is it can kinda beats up the worms. Just letting you know. I don’t sell my worms, so I really wouldn’t need to worry, but I really like my worms and don’t like to beat them up, they have been too, too good to me, know what I mean? I just use a sifter, with a 1/4 screen.

Sean decide that cheaper was definitely better, so he scrounged up some supplies at home (deck rails, L-brackets, and 1/4″ hardware cloth) and built a nifty little platform screener that fits neatly on top of a rubbermaid bin. You can read his post on his MySpace blog here.

I caught up with him this morning so he could donate his leftover deck rails and hardware cloth to me. I picked up some L-brackets at Lowes, and I assembled my harvester/screener tonight. Easy! I’ve got me a handy harvester! Sean tried his out tonight and he was satisfied with it. I’m going to give mine a try this weekend, when I harvest my bins and set aside starter stock for my new worm buddy, Jenny.

(By the time I got back with the camera, the cat had taken up residence on the screener.)