Vermiculture and Lactobacillus

Things are finally winding down on the "moving our lives to new digs" forefront. We have most of the necessities finally, and as of yesterday we emptied out our smaller storage unit and got everything in to the mid-sized unit. That was a hell of an accomplishment and a nice milestone.
The homesteading activities did NOT go on hiatus, however! I am bound and determined to work on things even if we don't have the "traditional " setup just yet!
The two projects that have been consuming my imagination are... Yogurt making and worm bins!
The yogurt was started first because you basically need milk, bacteria, containers and a fridge. I had all of those components walking in the door to our new place so nothing else was necessary. (Although I will cop to buying a 12-pack of Ball canning jars. Because it's something I would like to do one day.)
After asking if anybody had any recipes for making yogurt and being INUNDATED with the recipe on how to make it -and I will be honest, everybody told me their recipe made THE BEST YOGURTS EVAR and it was all literally the same set up steps- I went ahead and tried with organic whole milk snagged out of the dairy section of the supermarket. Nothing fancy, In fact, the love/hate/love/omgendthispain relationship I have with dairy had me concerned that perhaps I should be trying raw milk. Or almond milk. Or goat's milk. More on this in a bit. But for that first batch I crafted 3 and 3/5ths jars of whole cow's milk yogurt. I covered them in towels to keep them warm, dropped a lobster pot over top of them and let them sit for 14 hours.

And in this photo you see our high-tech yogurt making operation complete with stripey towel.

It was an utter success, and the worst part was waiting for the milk to cool down. I went and stirred it every time I got fidgety and tested the temp with a meat probe thermometer, because we are FANCY around here. As my friend Jennifer said, yogurt making is something you do while you're doing other things. Because really it's like that thing where you go do other stuff while the dryer is running. Or paint is drying. Or your mother in law is giving you advice. That kind of thing.
I DID cheat and use a single serve thing of Fage yogurt instead of going the purist route and popping open probiotic capsules, but there are no regrets. I enjoy the Fage product (or could when it still agreed with me) and therefore their bacteria was desirable.
You will note a trend of me buying food from places I like then using it to make my own food. Constantly. The only reason I don't have blueberry bushes right now is because you can't grow them from blueberries at the farmer's market!
After seeing how easy it was to do the cow's milk, I opted to look up almond milk yogurt and goat's milk yogurt and give it a shot.
No. Never again.
Because THIS is what happened with the almond yogurt after I cultured it and stashed it in the fridge for 2 days....

The separation was noticable in all 4 jars, and only got worse as it "aged". 

....and the smell was not good. Not good at all. Given that eating the homemade cow's milk stuff has actually proven to not trouble my stomach in the least, I will give up trying to make yogurt out of milk alternatives.
As far as the goat yogurt? I made it from raw goat's milk, and a mere teaspoon of it left me with goat flavoring in my mouth for an hour. I'll be using it for casseroles coming up, but it's just too strong for me to throw granola and fruit in to and munch on in the morning.
Happily, my second batch of cow's milk yogurt turned out better than the first, and this time in order to keep my kitchen counter clean I put it in the oven and left the light on overnight. The jars were warm to the touch when I stumbled downstairs 14-15 hours later, and definitely firmer and creamier somehow than the first batch was. I'm looking forward to making my third batch tomorrow and rolling the last of the second batch in to it as the culture! I have a love of generational things, and having my own slowly personalizing yogurt bacteria culture pleases me.

A successful "jarring" occasion. Get it??

Now! On to vermiculture!
I hate food waste. This was probably instilled in me by my father, who had to make do with soooo much less as a kid than I did when he was growing up. You ate the watermelon rind, damnit, (pickled for a treat sometimes) and the corn cob was sweet so you chewed on that, too, to get a little sugar when 5 cent candy was outside of what you could afford.
This is why I was chafing at the bit that we would be losing our compost bin with the sale of our last place. There would be so many fruit skins and pits and vegetable peelings going down the road in a plastic bag to a dumpster, waiting to be transported to a landfill where they would just sit, removed from the energy cycle until the bag split open and things could properly rot and shift around. I am also looking to start as many projects as can be safely and sanitarily done in our diminished space so there's less downtime when we finally have a place we can muck about in the dirt on. So while a compost bin would not be doable due to the smell and potential seepage and the fact that we can't put anything out on the grass because the landscapers can't mow  -not to mention complaints that we're putting rotting food outside that might attract the wildlife- I knew that a worm bin was the way to go.
I found a very simple model, the Worm Factory 360, on Amazon. It was compact and expandable depending on the needs of the household, meaning we could stow it in a corner in the garage and have our neighbors be none the wiser.
There are a TON of tutorials out there on making worm bins and some of them could be made with something as simple as a rubbermaid storage container. If you have the room or can have your worm bin outside, it's a much cheaper option and I highly recommend it. I only went with pre-made because it needed to be very compact and very clean. The model we got has a small bowl at the bottom to catch drippings if the compost gets too wet which you can pour off courtesy of a spigot as "worm tea" and go make your houseplant and garden plants' day by adding it to their regular water.
It arrived with a lot of bells and whistles, and a VERY in depth booklet explaining how to go about starting up the bin, caring for the worms, setting up the substraight, etc. I was so excited that I got to work immediately despite not having purchased the worms yet.
I started out by mixing up the coconut fibers, crushed mineral and shredded paper that they included in to a damp mound to help keep moisture and air in to the initial pan.

Yummy!

I then set down a few layers of wet newspaper to keep the worms from falling through the bin floor since there would be no soil yet for them to roll around in, added the substrate in, then tossed on all of the vegetable and fruit scraps I'd been saving up that week so the worms could start out with something yummy. I'd made chicken chili, so there were a LOT of greens to deal with.

Fun fact, you can throw in newspapers, flyers and junk mail for them to chew! As long as it's not glossy!

As you can see, we opted for the orangey-red model, because that seemed more fun to me than black or green and it would also stand out in the garage for people not to kick or bump accidentally. It lives right by the door going in to the garage currently, but I'm hoping to move it to the far wall after we get the mess in there from moving better organized.
After all that was complete, the only thing left to do was wet down some more layers of newspaper, lay them on top, then replace the lid. Voila! First pan started!

Looking respectable and slightly short.

One of the nice things about this model is that when one pan fills up, you just add another on top, and eventually the worms get done chowing on what's below and move up through the grid on the pan's bottom. It came with 4 pans but can expand up to 8 high. Seeing as you can sell the castings and that I will definitely be needing it to amend pot and garden soil in the future, I suspect we'll need those full 8 pans. But for now, we start with just the one!
 I then had to figure out how to get worms since it did not come with them. I opted to buy 500 live red wrigglers off of Amazon and opted for rush delivery because it's damned hot out currently and I didn't want them to get too stressed. There are cheaper ways to get your worms, such as having a friend dig a bunch out of their worm bin, or visit a vermiculture or bait place and snagging them there. I was in a hurry and didn't think I had the time to sit down and research where to go to get cheap or free worms. In hindsight, I could easily check it out. If something happens and I need to repopulate this bin, or a second or bigger bin when we're finally truly settled, I'm going to go the non-website route. You'd rather have local worms anyway, aclimated to the soil and climate.
When the worms arrived, it turned out they were from a worm farm north of here in PA. I was highly amused at the thought of those little guys traveling through the mail to come to rest still within the same state they started in. It was a cool day, and I popped open the bag ASAP to check on them.
As mentioned by the fabulous in depth booklet from the bin, the worms were in a ball in the middle of the peat and not feeling up to doing much. I quickly took them out to the bin, popped the top, peeled back the newspaper and just dropped them on in. To help rehydrate them I also drizzled half a cup of water over the peat and the ball of worms. They began to move immediately, to my relief.

Smile for the camera! Or... not.

Over the next 48 hours I checked several times to make sure none were making a run for it. Some explored out to the edges of the bin, but nobody fell all the way to the floor. As of tonight when I went to put this week's compost pail of goodies in, they had all disappeared down in to the greenery and were munching away happily.
So there you have it, my adventure with tiny, tiny creatures and learning to make my own food and make best use of what has already been consumed and left afterwards. When the first tray is mostly turned to worm castings I'll take a few pictures so everyone can view the transformation. The more I look at the amount of food in there and the number of worms I bought, I'm starting to think the advice of buying at least a pound of worms was wiser. about 1,000 worms equals a pound, but I didn't think I would have enough for 1,000 worms to eat so I hedged. I could take stuff out to the bin every day if I wanted, between junk mail and deliveries and cooking dinner. They'll catch up eventually, I'm just not sure how quickly. A mini science experiment, perhaps!
As far as the yogurt, in the near future I'm going to do a post showing all the things I've been doing with that on top of just maufacturing it. It is the single most popular thing I make currently, with Girlchild requesting "Yoguh" every morning when we start making breakfast. She downs it like it's going out of style, prompting me to make more each time! But I digress, this post is enormous, and that's it for now.
Thanks to all for reading!