Welcome back to the homestead, everybody. If you garden, you know how important worms are to the health of your soil. Well, what you see behind me is a continuous flow worm bin that I’m going to show you how to build so you can grow your own worms and produce the best soil you possibly can.
Before
we jump in, wanted to let you know there is a materials list below in the description as well as a cut list. All of this stuff I found at Home Depot for just under 200 bucks. So, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to cut our eight foot sidewalls down just a bit so that when we build our top, our screen top, it can fit nice and flush over it. To do that, we’re going to take off just about an inch and 3/4.
All right, we got our sidewalls cut. This is going to be our in walls. And we’re going to cut this to 27 in. The reason being is because I want my overall bin, the overall width of it to be 2 1/2 ft.
Okay. So, there’s our basic layout. Let’s go ahead and screw these together. When you’re drilling these screws in, these are 3-in screws. You’re gonna want to pre-drill first because you’re right on the edge here. So, it’s just nice to not have any cracks in this thing. So, I’m gonna put four screws in each side here.
All right, we got our frame all done. The next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to create the poles that go at the bottom of this bin. Now, you’ll learn exactly what that’s for later on in the video. Um, but for now, just think of it as the bottom of the worm bin. To do that, we have 1/2 in conduit, metal conduit, and we have a 13/16 drill bit. So, we’re going to drill a hole about every inch and a half along the bottom here, all along this bottom on both sides of the sidewalls. So to do that, we’re going to measure down on one side. We’re going to say right at about 9 and 1/2 in from the top is going to be the where our holes are going to be. Again, 9 and 1/2 in. We’ll strike a line right at this 9 and 1/2 in mark.
Okay. So, we’ll go ahead and make our marks for our conduit. To do that, we’re going to come 3 and 1/2 in over to do our first mark for the first hole to be drilled. Uh, and then after that, we’re just going to go 2 in every single time. So, lay our tape measure out and go 2 in. So,
all right, we got our holes marked. Let’s go ahead and drill a ton of holes.
All right, holes are done on one side. We got to do it on the other side. Okay, so we got our um holes drilled. Everything looks nice. Set the conduit in there. Looks good. Um the next step is we have to cut our pieces of conduit. We need 45 of these. And I suggest to measure them on your own. For me, I’m going to do 29 and a half. That’s kind of the median number between these two sideboards. Again, measure yours because your sideboards could be bowed or whatever it is. Make sure you measure before you cut. So, let’s cut 45 of these 29 1/2 in pieces of conduit.
Okay, so we got our conduit in. Next thing we’re going to do is cover our holes on each side with our one by two.
These are just inch and 5/8. Okay, that’s going to hold our piece of the conduit in. And then we’ll do one on the other side. All right, we got our sides on. Again, this is just to stop the conduit from being able to get out on either side. Got those on each side. All right, the next thing we’re going to do is attach or cut and attach our legs. And I’m doing my legs to 46 in. What you doing? What are you doing? I’m doing my legs to 46 in. So, it’ll be about 36 and 3/4 off the ground.
So, we’re going to meet it flush on the top. That’s why I said it’s going to be countertop height or about countertop height when it’s all done. I’m just going to put one in here. And I’m using uh 2 and 1/2 in screws this time.
And we’re just going to level it out.
All right, we are done. The main kind of structure here. I like it. I like the height. Uh my wife asked me why is it so tall? And the reason I built it so tall or put the legs so tall is because a lot of the work that you’re going to be doing is underneath. So, a lot of the laborous work is going to be underneath. So, the next step is we’re going to be making our screened top. I wanted an extra layer of protection from bugs and stuff like that. And so, we’re going to be tacking together uh this one by two around the whole edge. And then, we’re going to be stapling a screen on top.
I’m just taking a good amount of wood glue, putting it on there. And we’re just
brad nailing this together.
All right. So, we got our top stapled and glued together. I found this at Home Depot. This is just some It’s like screen, mosquito screen, bug screen, whatever. It’s 36 in wide and 25 ft long. So, we’re going to take this and I’m just going to staple it on top of that uh top frame that we just made. You could use some batten tape like like you would use on a greenhouse.
just to secure it a little more.
But I’m not going to do that.
All right, we got our top done. Screen is on. So, this will add another just an extra layer of protection against the bugs. Um, because this is going to go in our basement and we want to keep the bugs to a minimum. The next step is we are going to add hinges to the back here. These are just some surface mounted hinges that I had laying around. All
right. So, we got our worm bin in the basement, but before we start filling it up, I wanted to add a base layer of just about 4 in of compost. We have some compost that’s been sitting over here for quite a while, but it’s a little bit too thick. It’s got too many big chunks in it. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to sift it or seve it through this screener right here. This is a/4 in screener. And this is going to take the consistency from something like this to something like this, much finer. And this will be a much better bedding for the worms.
Okay, so now we got our nice fine compost. This is going to be a great bedding material.
But before we put it in our uh worm bin, we’re going to give it a little water. We’re going to just soak it down just a little bit. We’re not going to overdo it. We’re not going to drench it. We’re just going to get it a little bit moist so that when it goes into the worm bin, everything’s a little bit saturated. is
we grow. All right. And that’s kind of the finished product there. You can see it doesn’t fall apart as easy. It’s got good moisture in it. So, we’ll take this down and put it in our bin. Okay. So, we’re in the basement now. And this is where the worm bin is going to stay permanently. Couple key things. Uh it’s nice to have a light right over where the worms are so you can really do a good inspection. Uh you can feed them. You can see what’s going on. So the first thing we’re going to do now that we have it in place is we’re going to take some like a roll of craft paper basically. Um I got this at again at Home Depot. Uh it’s just some masking paper for painting. And we’re going to roll out two layers on the bottom on top of our conduit here.
So once you got it all kind of situated, you’re just going to soak it down.
Now all we’re going to do is just start dumping our soil in.
You’ll always be my every second, every day.
All right, so we got our bedding down. I am super impressed with the way this compost screened. Um it is uh soaked with water and so we got good moisture, not too much. So the next step guys, we are going to put our worms inside of our bin. Now this is just a really small kind of portion of worms that we got started off with from a friend. And so we’re going to go ahead and put those in here. But I have about a thousand more worms coming next week. And then when they come, I’ll go ahead and put those in there. All right. And here is our kind of temporary. This was our temporary holding bin. You can see
they’re all down in here. We got some nice chopped up watermelon.
Probably get a handful in here.
We got something in here.
I’m going to start them on this edge over here.
Love
Me and Isaiah got most of the worms in here. Hopefully all of them. I didn’t want to dump the whole bucket in because it has really thick compost in it. I wanted to keep everything pretty fine. And like I said, we have 1,000 worms coming next week. We’re going to put in here. But for the last step, all we’re going to do, this side’s pretty good and wet, but we just added a little bit more compost on this side. So, I’m just going to do a quick
drench over here. So, the last step we’re going to do is we are going to put something over top of the bedding. For us, that’s going to be that craft paper. Again, we’re just going to use that craft paper and put it on top. You can use a lot of different items. Um, a lot of people use plastic, clear plastic. The good thing about clear plastic is worms, uh, they can’t tell up from down. And so the way that they do that is by light. And so a lot of people will come and they’ll put lights on the side of their worm bin, which we’ll probably do. We’ll come back and do that because it drives them more down into the uh into the interior of the soil. So let’s grab that craft paper and lay it on.
The other good thing that adding a covering to the top does is it keeps the moisture in your soil. And then the other beneficial thing is that it just keeps down on the flies. So obviously we’re in our basement. We don’t want a ton of flies. Um we have this added layer of protection for the screen so they don’t get through and down into the soil or out.
So obviously if you’re using craft paper or any sort of cardboard or anything like that, it’s going to break down over time. So we’ll probably have to replace this every once in a while, which is fine. So that’s it, guys. We are done with our worm bin setup. Let’s go ahead and close the top.
Before I close this video, I want to take a minute to address a couple questions that might come up as you’re watching this video. So, the first one is this is, like I said before, a continuous flow through system. So, that means as the worms break down this area up here, they produce worm castings. Obviously, the worm castings come and they end up on the bottom of your worm bin. And then
when you’re ready to harvest, you take a tool kind of like this one, whatever works for you, just so that when you place it in between your pieces of conduit, it kind of lines up with the underside of the soil. And then all you do is you pull backwards and you rake out the worm castings and they fall into these bins. So that’s how the continuous flowth through system works. That’s why it’s continuous. You never have to dump anything. You never have to change anything. This system is going to last forever. So, that’s a really cool aspect of this worm bin. The next question I want to address is the height of this bin. Now, there’s other models out there you can find on the internet that do this same kind of method, but with uh OSB or plywood. I chose to not use plowwood or OSB because uh I wanted the structure to be very strong and I wasn’t convinced that the amount of kind of cubic material that we needed called for something very tall. But as always, do kind of what works for your application.