I was so discouraged when these guys showed up in my CFT’s this past year but basically because they out competed my red wigglers for the food, they generated too much heat while feeding and caused 2 of my CFT’s to virtually collapse in various sections.
I use a lot of rabbit manure in my bins, my rabbits provide close to 10 gallons of manure weekly. Earlier this year I was able to make a great contact and to start getting close to 5 gallons of coffee grounds every other week…but this lead to too much heat being generated in the CFT’s with the addition of all the coffee grounds, rabbit anure with hay mixed in…… so I was forced to start pre-composting.
This led to a even better feeding system for me actually….so instead of carting numerous 5 gallon buckets of feedstock I now only have 2- five gallon buckets and my handy wheeled cart full of wet shredded cardboard !!
My process begins on a Sunday….. I will layer used coffee grounds, rabbit manure with hay and aged grass clippings and water each layer. I was adding a mulched leaf/wood chip mixture but I stopped that and just add that directly to the bin. I let that sit covered for about 5 days, then go and flip it around and water if needed. The next Sunday the mixture is ready to be pulled and harvested down.
I shovel the entire mixture evenly into concrete mixing trays and sit them in the sun… the BSFL will dive down so all you have to do is scrape the mixture off (wear gloves!) until you are left with mostly the BSFL which you then transfer into the new material. I do spend a few hours doing this as I have 6 CFT’s to feed.
Here is what you end up with to feed the worms. A wet mucky mess that they love that is mostly BSFL free. This is a lot of BSFL frass mixed with partially broken down rabbit manure. I don’t worry too much about a few getting into the bins but definitely don’t want as many as seen here
This was just one tub, the one beside it had a lot more, but they were happy to be placed back into a new section of food.