How To Harvest Worm Castings

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We are going to harvest some worm castings. We are going to try out a new product. And we are going to harvest a worm bin in 15 minutes or less. Stick around...it's going to be fun!


Let me kind of set this up for you. Here we have a typical worm bin that is 14" by 18" by 6" deep. It has about 3 to 4 inches of worm bedding.

I'd say it's probably a pretty typical home-size worm bin. Right here, I just have an empty tray and a white sandbag in the bottom of it so you can see what's going on.

We are going to be using our Worm Castings Screen Harvester. This is actually our product and there's kind of a story behind it.

We raise most of our worms outside but we ship a lot of worms from our online website. We have trays indoors to keep worms for shipping to customers.

Worms are harvested outside occasionally and brought in to our trays indoors. Several times a year we have one or two trays to harvest indoors.

We don't want to get the big shaker screener out because it takes longer to clean it up than harvesting a few trays of worm castings.

Something was needed that was quick and easy. We came up with this product, we've been using it for a few years, and we're really happy with it.

The Screener works so well and I thought...let's share it with everybody. So, here it is. The way it comes is in a poly bag with instructions.

You can see that the instructions are pretty short because it is pretty darn easy to use. The main takeaway here is to screen fairly dry castings.

This applies whether it be with a big commercial trommel or large shaker screener. You can not screen wet and muddy castings. It will clog the screens.

When I know that we're going to have to harvest worm castings, I won't feed or water the worm bin for a couple of weeks.

That usually works pretty well for our operation. Of course, if your worm bins are wetter, it might take a little bit longer.

If they are drier, it might take a little shorter time. When we started I said we were going to do this in 15 minutes or less.

Honestly, I've never timed this before. I have done this for quite a while and that seems like a nice round number.

I've got a timer preset right here with 15 minutes and we're going to set it right here and then I'm going to start it.

We're going to get going. What we will have left in this tray is unprocessed material, worms, and cocoons.

We are going to add them to our third tray over here. Then, we just repeat the process. You don't want to put a lot of material in the tray.

A good handful is about right. Actually, if you put too much in, it will slow you down. We will harvest the worm castings with the timer in view.

I will speed up the video so you don't have to watch me harvesting for 15 minutes.

We're getting to the end right here and I have got maybe one more tray over here, As you can see, we've got a pretty nice pile of castings in the tray.

I will stop my timer. There are 7 minutes and 59 seconds left, so it was pretty quick. Around seven minutes to harvest the entire worm bin.

The thing I like about this is that a lot of thought went into the screen size. We use 1/8 inch Diamond mesh.

The eighth-inch diamond mesh catches 100% of the European Nightcrawler cocoon and catches about 80% of the red worm cocoons.

You'll still have a few of the red worm cocoons go through because some of the worms and cocoons are smaller.

If you're really concerned, you can hand pick the few that go through. As you can see, the worm castings have no cocoons in them.

They are pretty solid castings. This is the tray we just harvested. This tray right here is all worms, unprocessed bedding, and cocoons.

The normal operation here would be to split the tray. I would take half the worms, unprocessed material, and cocoons and add back to the tray I just harvested.

I would just leave the other half in this tray and add new bedding to both trays.

We will now have two trays, our worms are split, and everything will go fine.

What did we accomplish? We harvested a tray worm castings. Our worm bin was harvested in about 7 minutes.

That's probably pretty normal for the typical home worm bin.

We really like this new Worm Castings Screen Harvester. It solved a big problem for us when we only had to harvest a worm bin or two.

That is the category that most hobbyist worm farmers fall into. We think it would be a great addition to your worm farming efforts.

If you are interested in purchasing this product, I will put the link in the description below. Until next time, happy worming.