Woohoo, today is a big day for my little worm farm! Gargantua, my homemade CFT, is finally ready for its first harvest. It is now full and I can start a regular harvest.

Just a quick reminder on how you harvest a CFT of this style. There are CFT worm bins that have a grid and a blade that cut a slice of vermicompost VC off the bottom. Gargantua however uses a simple false bottom made of PVC pipes. To harvest it you need to rake the bottom and the VC falls down.

In a commercial CFT weekly fed with horse manure, the manure loose about 25% of volume when it is converted to vermicompost by the worms so it is possible to harvest about 2" of VC weekly while you feed the top to refill it. However with a food scraps fed CFT like Gargantua I will only probably be able to harvest those 2" every month. It's all about maintaining the depth of VC in the CFT so that it's always around 24", this so that cocoons all hatch and worms all migrate upwards. This due to the fact that food scraps loose about 80% of the volume during conversion. Thanks to Brian "The Worm Man" for this reminder. I sometimes collect horse manure locally, so I could use it to speed things up a bit when needed.

What does this event means to me? I knew it was going to take a while for Gargantua to be full. It actually took 16 months! So I prepared myself by setting up multiple smaller bins that allow me to have a regular production of VC for the garden. Now I can simplify the setup and I got rid of all my Worm Cafe bins. That will make me extra space to install a larger Black Soldier Fly Larve composting system.

Enough bla bla for now, here is the video: