Two more flow-through worm bins
Winter is breeding season around here. While the worms multiply, we're building two more continuous flow-through bins, each 2 feet by 8 feet, which will bring us to three running bins by spring 2027.
Where we started
Cheese Worm Farm began in October 2026 with about 20,000 red wigglers living in 27-gallon totes inside our heated 14-foot greenhouse. They eat cardboard, fallen leaves, and broken-down chicken manure, and they've been busy.
Totes are a great way to start. The catch comes at harvest: getting castings out of a tote means dumping it and sorting worms from finished castings by hand. That's slow, and it stresses the worms.
What a flow-through bin does differently
A continuous flow-through bin (CFT for short) is a raised bin with an open floor, usually a grate or mesh. It works like this:
- Food and bedding go on top. The worms stay up where the fresh food is.
- Castings settle to the bottom as the worms work down through the material and move back up to eat.
- Harvest happens from underneath. Finished castings are scraped out through the floor, while the worms keep working above, undisturbed.
The "continuous" part is the point: no dumping, no sorting, and a steady supply of castings instead of one big messy batch.
Why 2 by 8?
Compost worms feed near the surface, so a bin's capacity comes down to surface area more than depth. Each new bin gives the worms 16 square feet. Using the same rule of thumb as our worm calculator (about one square foot per pound of weekly food scraps), each bin can handle roughly 16 pounds of feed a week once it's fully stocked.
Why build in winter?
The worms are warm in the greenhouse and breeding, so the population grows while we build. By the time the bins are finished, there will be plenty of worms to move in, and spring is when those bins start producing the castings we'll sell.
What's next
Build photos are coming as the bins come together. Castings go on sale once all three bins are producing, which we're aiming for in spring 2027. Want first dibs? Join the castings waitlist.
Cheese has been supervising construction from a safe distance.