Wormgineering LLC: The Worm Jug

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Worm Jug Setup and maintenance:

Buy it, place it, feed it, add paper occasionally.

It really is that easy! Just put it someplace safe and where you can walk up to it, lift the top off, lift the lower bag up and drop the food in.

You check out the moisture level by looking at the newspaper in the lower bag. You need the lower bag to get things started off well. After a few months or so, the paper in the bag will get too wet and / or compacted, and then you empty the bag into the jug bottom and fluff it up a bit. After that, the bag just gets in the way, and it's easier to lift the strips directly to drop the food in. You'll want to add a few dry strips if it gets too soggy. Once you get to this point, you can help the worms out by fluffing things up as monthly maintenance.

See the About Worm Jug shipping discussion for more details about receiving and initial setup of your Worm Jug. All you need to do, if it arrives without being shaken up too badly by UPS, is carefully remove it from the boxes, remove the wrapper to do an initial inspection, put it back together (drop in the lower bag, wrap and secure the wrapper, replace the Jug Top) and carefully place it in its (preferably permanent) location.

Feeding:

Worm Jugs are shipped with a small food supply included. For the first few weeks, as your worms get up to speed, you will be feeding no more than 1/4 cup once a week.

Ideally, you should open the jug to ventilate it at least twice a week but of course you do that automatically every time you feed.

Feeding is very easy and you should soon get a good feel for when and how much. But as a beginner, you are likely wondering about the first few weeks as you establish the ecosystem. I've got you covered with an extended discussion. But I do not want to fill up this page with more details than it already has. And I want it to be an actual discussion, not just a one-way thing but giving you the ability to ask questions in near-real time. That is a job for good old fashioned Bulletin Board software. So here it is: About Worm Jug Feeding. By the way you will be amazed at how much food you end up putting in before it fills up.

Harvesting:

Of course, at some point you will have to remove some of the vermicompost. Oh darn. Nature's Favorite Plant Food, with a mild but nice earthy aroma, it is the richest soil you will ever see. When other animals poop it is typically rather disgusting, but worm poop isn't like that: worms poop a finished product that is the opposite of disgusting. That's right: worm poop is as wholesome as it gets. I know, I know, but just you wait and see.

Harvesting a Worm Jug - after 3 to 6 months or so - and returning the Worms for another round is about a half-hour job. This is also a subject for 2-way discussion, so there is another thread on the forums About Worm Jug Harvesting

Dos and Don'ts:

• DO NOT OVERFEED
• DO keep the Worm Jug indoors at normal room temperature
• DO stuff newpaper strips into the upper bag to keep the Jug Top stuffed full (rarely required)
• DO stuff dry newpaper strips under the lower bag if the base bedding is too wet (muddy)
• DO empty the lower bag's contents into the Jug if it becomes a dense wet mass, remove bag
• DO handle with care at all times, lift from the bottom and with both hands
• DO NOT OVERFEED
• DO NOT overtighten the wrapper: make sure the Jug Top lifts off easily
• DO NOT remove the neoprene edge guard material
• DO NOT put bad foods in (NO Meat, Dairy, Oils, Pet Waste; light on citrus, bread, salty stuff)
• DO NOT add liquids unless the base bedding is clearly too dry (no more than 1/4 cup & directly on the base bedding).
• DO NOT allow the Worm Jug to be affected by vibrating appliances
• DO NOT OVERFEED

Worm Jug Materials:

The design is simple and the materials are top quality: start with a re-purposed one-gallon glass jug cut in half using special tooling developed by the wormgineer. Add top quality, thick neoprene edge guard for the glass rims, wrap it with high quality 1/2 inch thick foam, the same stuff used for instrument cases: Volara® closed cell foam, grey in color. Black elestic fabric bands secure the wrapper. The mesh bags are polyester to resist decomposition (spare bags included) and come filled with newspaper strips. Add a rubber band and some brass safety pins for the bags, and we're done with the "hardware".

In the bottom of the Jug is a thick layer of base bedding, the habitat for the biological activity that makes the Worm Jug work. It is a special mix of nine ingredients, all selected as part of an ideal mixture that will support not just the Worm Jug, but also future worm bins that are started with vermicompost from the Worm Jug (it has an abundance of all sizes of grit, which Red Wigglers need to help digest their food).

Inside the Worm Jug

The Worm Jug is a mini version of a normal worm bin, with a major difference: there is no drainage. Having a sealed glass bottom, so it cannot possibly leak even a little bit, is actually one of the features that lets you find a nice indoor home for your Worm Jug. The reason the Worm Jug works well for the worms even without drainage is that its small size lets you easily notice and correct the situation.

If the base bedding gets too wet, the worms will crawl up the walls. This is one of the things you look for and react to. By stuffing dry paper in to soak it up, the excess moisture does not have to be drained.

Here's where the worms want to be (right): by a nice little pile of food (a vegetable-rice medley is shown), with moist bedding chock full of minerals, quiet and dark except when the humans peek in. They have a cover of nice moist newspaper strips - in a bag so you can lift it easily and cleanly (below right).

The upper bag is an important part of the system: it is your primary defense against fruit flies. Note that it is attached to the Jug Top by a special twist/overlap/secure technique. This insures that the mouth is covered by netting without gaps and that they do not have access to the inside of the upper bag. The upper bag provides good ventilation but the fruit flies can smell the food in the bottom of the Worm Jug. They will be blocked from getting to it.

Under normal circumstances, you should not have to mess with the upper bag at all for quite a while (3-9 months), perhaps stuffing in newspaper strips to keep it fluffy. You need to make sure the upper bag stays full and fluffy and mostly dry so that it fills up the space, causing it to stay pressed against the inner walls of the Jug Top, as seen in these photos. The photo to the left shows the bag being stretched out to give you access to the opening to stuff newspaper strips in. After doing that, make sure it stuffs back into the Jug Top without giving fruit flies a direct path on the glass of the inside of the Jug Top. This will block the little suckers. They may be able to get thru the first net across the mouth, but no further. Again, you probably won't have to mess with it at all any time soon.

The Worm Jug: Simple but effective small scale vermiculture. Next thing you know, you'll be an expert organic gardener.

The Worm Jug Story

The underlying business concept behind Wormgineering LLC has always been defined by trying to bring vermiculture to as many people as possible. This business would not be possible without all the people out there who have built home-made systems and figured out what works, but it seems like the right time to make an effort to take vermicomposting from a niche hobby to a widespread practice by providing professionally engineered products directed to that purpose.

So when I saw this pile of crates appear in a neighbor's yard last winter, I got to thinking. That's a lot of well-formed glass to just toss into the recycling stream. And this is a lifelong collection of Jugs! Some of these date back at least into the 70's and I found some newspaper packed around some pieces dated 1954! I am not saying any of these jugs are that old, and certainly some of them are less than 20 years old but still, this glass was collected over a long time period and it seemed fitting to do something cool with them.

Since a whole one-gallon glass jug would be a lousy vessel for a mini worm bin, first I had to figure out if they could be reliably cut in two. I jumped that hurdle and now have home-made tooling that does the job very well indeed.

Cut in half, the user now has a nice clean, deep glass bowl for a well contained little worm bed that isn't too small to be worth doing. But it needed to be nearly foolproof. Without drainage, I wasn't yet convinced that "just folks" would almost always make it work.

The answer came in several parts, mostly in two realizations: 1) Dry newspaper can always be added to soak up moisture as long as it does not get flooded, and 2) I need to ship an already functioning setup with closely controlled moisture content. The first one is easy for you and the second one is easy for me.

The trick was making sure that such a thing could be shipped and then continue to mature without a lot of intervention to repair potential damage caused by UPS. After a little experimentation with the bags, a decision to double box the Worm Jugs (I'd rather not just because of the required extra plastic foam: something I'm burdening my customer with) and carefully developing shipping policy, those issues have been answered and I am ready to stand behind this product.

The true key realization is that Red Wigglers are incredibly adaptable. I strive to give them an ideal environment, and as long as you don't do something drastically wrong (DO NOT ADD LIQUIDS), they will be more than fine, in fact they will thrive.

About the Glass Jugs

The Worm Jug is a hand-crafted product made from found materials. The wormgineer is a Manufacturing Engineer by profession and inclination so they are made as uniform as possible using documented processes. The cut line to make the jug halves is never perfect, but I give it a quick sanding to remove the sharpest edges. To keep the Worm Jug safe, the edge guard MUST NOT be removed. It is not glued into place in order to allow adjustment so that the two halves seal together.

The glass jugs are from a massive multi-decade personal collection, so there is variation in the exact shape of the jugs. The basic design is mostly the same, but looking at them closely, there is a lot of variation! I got them sorted out, and will be selling what I think are the "coolest" ones first. The first series will be "wide-mouth facteted", and then all the rest will be the "normal" design, which actually shows a lot of variation in the finger lug and neck area, except that I am holding back a dozen of the faceted types for sometime later.

Twenty (20) Worm Jugs, very similar to the one shown here are available; I'm calling them "Founder's Edition" Worm Jugs. The"normal" shape is also available.

With that, I ask you to become part of the Worm Jug story. Just for the heck of it, I will be selling them in numbered series. Buy now to get a potential collector's item with one of the first hundred Worm Jugs.

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