In the wintertime, I take my composting efforts indoors to pay attention to the worms. We had yet another uncharacteristically warm day here (if just one more person says “omg i love global warming lol”…ugh ), so I checked out the composter…full of worms!
It had just rained, and the inside was a bit damp…so my guess is that the earthworms were just looking for warm, moist ground and they found it in there. They also found a lot of stuff they probably weren’t used to, like a Sun Chips bag trying to degrade, and some paper packaging material that I lazily threw in without ripping it up, just for fun.
I get a lot of emails talking about worms in the composter…these worms are almost certainly just earthworms (sorry earthworms) and not red wigglers (composting worms).
Red wigglers aren’t a guaranteed solution for your compost tumbler- it just depends on if they can adjust to the habitat.
It’s getting tumbled weekly and can get very hot- not necessarily hot enough to kill worms, but they can simply exit through the vent and hang around nearby if the conditions are more favorable.
There were a few times where I thought I had killed off the worms in the tumbler while it was active, but they just came back a little later instead.