Now that we have set our worm bins up and running and have been feeding them for a couple of months it may be time now for the bins to be sorted so we can have access to the castings and worms.

You will know its time to harvest when you start to notice that the bedding has changed in texture and also you may notice that the amount of bedding material has actually dropped down in size.

Now I will be the first to admit that harvesting is not one of my favourite things about worm farming but once done it can be very satisfying because of all the fresh organic castings and extra amounts of worms that have been produced.Now there are several different methods that can be used in the harvesting process:

1.This process is ideal if you only want to harvest castings,firstly stop feeding your worms until all the feed in the bin has been consumed then move all the bedding material over to one side of the bed so as to leave enough room to add new bedding.Now after the new bedding has been added mix some fresh feed into it and leave the bed for a few days,the worms from the old bedding will have started to migrate over to the new bedding material so as to reach the new food supply,now you can safely remove to old bedding from the bin.The old bedding will still contain worm capsules and the odd worm or two which were to slow to move to the new bedding so if you wanted to you could add some fresh feed & bedding to this and start a new worm bin or a more time consuming way is to sort through the bedding and remove manually any capsules or worms that you come across or thirdly just sacrifice what ever is there and put directly into the garden or use for what ever purpose you have for it.

2.This process lets you harvest both castings and worms.Firstly make sure that your new bedding material is ready to be used,now on a table with a sheet of plastic empty your old bin completely out and make several easily managable mounds.Now that the mounds have been made place a bright light or alternatively sunlight over the top of the mounds, now because worms dont like direct light they will fight there way down to the bottom , so every 10 minutes or so scrape the tops of the mounds away and repeat this process until all you will have remaining is a big mass full of worms with very little bedding.Now hopefuly within one of those ten minute waiting periods you will have added new bedding material into the old bin or maybe even into a new one as well because you will not want to have the worms out of their bedding for too long.As with the old bedding you can follow the same procedures as is shown in the first procedure.

There are also other procedures such as mechanical sorters which are used on larger farms which let you harvest large amounts of bedding and worms quickly but you will find that the two I have outlined will be sufficent for the home system.