this year i want to do another update showing my outdoor vermicomposting system using red worm wigglers if you want to know more about how i initially set this up please be sure to watch my earlier videos from the previous years but this year i'm going to show you in the summer whenever i was emptying this out how much i actually pulled out of this very compact system and i'm also going to show you a system that i've developed for myself out of necessity to be able to shift a larger amount of vermicompost extracting those very fine worm castings that then you can use for things like seed starting and other things for fertilizing your plants so it's pretty exciting for me let's get in here first let's look at how much that i got out of this compact box just a couple of months ago i finally reached the bottom of my worm box dug everything out i've lined it with some cardboard and i'm going to begin rebuilding my bedding and putting in my worms and everything to re-layer it for another year i've been going through my pre-sifting and the stuff of course that i'm going to put back into the box a lot of worms and big pieces are here and this stuff is still going to need to be finely sifted to get it to the state that i want it to be in but here's the problem right here i also have to sift this so i have six five gallon buckets full to the top that's insane 36 gallons of worm castings all from this one box that i just kind of would periodically put some things in put a whole bunch of shredded leaves in in the fall and now look at everything that i've gotten from this and of course i have a bed two little uh attachments in the front and i have alpine strawberries that i only put in this year and these guys are going insane they're just pumping out little strawberries they love it this is doing a little bit too well and that's my problem this year well that was a lot more vermicompost than i expected i would get from this system and in the past i had a real rudimentary basic way using a frame screen from a screen door to be able to sift all of those castings and that worked at a slightly smaller scale but once you get into buckets and buckets and buckets of vermicompost you need something to be able to get through faster otherwise it's just too daunting so i want to show you what i cooked up to be able to get through all those buckets that i had to sift to get those very very fine castings and maybe this might give you some ideas to help you if you're in a similar situation and here we are this is the elbo pepper super sifter 2.0 it's a 32 inch by 32 inch mesh screen that you would maybe get from a hardware store for a screen window or screen door and if you measure the grid itself this is a 16th by 16th opening for that mesh i wanted to go with metal hoping that that would hold up a little bit longer you can build this to whatever size works for you if you look here we have a solid side both on this side and this side but uh i'm wrapping and pulling this screen up along these these sides and that's going to allow me to have a bigger batch that i can set in here and not worry about just flopping off of the edges and i have some handles here that i can hold onto and i think if i'd had the screen just a little bit longer so i could wrap around the corners that would have helped even more but this is a prototype and certainly it's been working a lot better than what i was using we see how this is made but do you want to know a cool trick that can help you to quickly get through a larger volume of castings while still doing it all just by hand what i've done is i've tied in to the bottom of a couple of these trusses in my garage and tied a couple of cords one on this truss one on this one if you follow them down i have a little loop that i had tied on these and what that's going to allow me to do is to slip this over the one board that's on the one end of this so let me hook this up and you'll see a little bit better what i'm talking about what this is going to do for me is it will be like having a second pair of hands that's going to be holding this side up now if you want to raise this a little bit beyond what you had initially tied off in your loops all you have to do is wrap it around a couple of times this one is a little bit longer so it takes a couple extra times to wrap it and now i have something that is suspending the one half and all i have to do is just swing this back and forth holding on to the other end and i have a nice fluid motion so let's look at how this works all right we're all set up now i don't want to overload this with too much weight and break the screen so i'm just very gently putting some on not doing the entire bucket at once but uh got these different clods you can break them up a little bit by hand if you want and now check this out just go back and forth if you wanted you could use four strings tie onto each handle of this so that you don't have to actually hold any of the weight whatsoever but i find this to be pretty easy and it allows me the flexibility of being able to tilt and angle this much more easily so this works for me so all that's left now are the more coarse particles and our worms so you don't really have to sift your vermicompost at all if you don't want especially depending on what you're going to use it for but i like mine to be finely sifted and i like to recover as many worms as i can and doing this allows me to achieve that goal then now i can take what little remains these more coarse particles and just add those back into my box which is going to restock it with all of these worms so that i can keep a nice population and the final product is this black gold very very fine texture similar to maybe coffee grinds just some excellent stuff and if you've seen my earlier videos doing some testing as a seed starting mix doing it the way that i've done it and what i've been feeding them and everything the way i've been raising them i mean this stuff has worked really well so check those videos out if you haven't but this is a system that's going to allow me to continue to do this to be able to have a larger yield and still be able to process it without being overwhelmed well guys that's all for today i appreciate you taking time to watch this video please subscribe if you haven't already and as always happy gardening