When it comes to vermicomposting, I’m a big fan although it requires some attention to ensure the worms are happy. I’ve made my own worm bins in the past, and then decided to focus my attention on the Worm Inn system: better airflow, easier harvesting of castings.
I kinda forgot about the Worm Factory 360. It’s been on the market for a while now, but I never paid attention to it since I started with making my own bin anyway.
I was hanging out at my friend Brian’s house, and he wanted me to take a look at his worm system in the basement. I had noticed a few flies in his house before he led me downstairs, and I figured they were from his Worm Factory…I was right.
I took a look around on some forums, and that seems to be a common issue with this thing- and now I see why. Here’s a picture of his system:
Upon opening it up, right away I noticed that all the trays were not only full of castings, but they were full of friggin awesome castings.
I was impressed. The castings were really moist, and that’s the thing with plastic…it doesn’t breathe well, if at all. There are little gaps around the edges of the trays, maybe this is intentional to get some necessary airflow in there.
There were a lot of critters inside, indicating the system was alive and… well? Maybe slightly out of balance- it was lacking cardboard. Worms love cardboard, and I’m not sure if that’s scientifically been proven yet, but they like crawling in the corrugated tubes and I’ve read that the glue is tasty to them (can anyone confirm this?).
Besides taming the flies, the spigot seems to be the other design challenge. Looking at the bottom tray, it was holding a significant amount of leachate because the castings were clogging up the spigot. Makes sense.
What I didn’t expect was that although the bottom trays were all processed into castings, they still contained plenty of worms. The worms seemed to go where they pleased (which is great and I’m happy for them), but I figured they’d all be in the top tray focused on eating the food.
How would I rate this thing? Well, I only hung out with it (them) for about 10 minutes…but based on that, it exceeded my expectations. I think they have the potential to be a really solid system with next to no issues, but you have to work a little bit for it. Keep the dry materials coming into this thing and I think the castings/spigot/flies issues should become minimized.
If you’d like to learn more about one of these, I suggest clicking here to go to the company page on Amazon. Plus, it’s always fun to read Amazon reviews, isn’t it?