The Worms Are Doing Fine

Not much to report lately the worms keep eating what ever I give them. They eat soft watery foods faster than the dryer thicker stuff. Like strawberries, they devour them in about 2 days. The cabbage or lettuce hearts take a bit longer. I have started a Bokashi bran experiment. In case you don't know what that is it is a type of fermentation using specific anaerobic bacteria to pickle your compostables. I am guessing that the worms will be able to process things like cabbage hearts much faster once they go through the Bokashi Process.

I started from scratch on this one. Bokashi kits and the bran are too expensive for me. There are plenty of websites out there that tell you how to grow your own bacteria that you use to inoculate the bran which in turn you use for pickling your waste. Then the process is much faster. There are youtube and other sites that show you step by step how to build a bokashi compost kit. Once it starts it only takes about 2 weeks to be ready to feed to the worms.

That is the way I intend on using it. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that it also expands the possible inputs to your compost. Meat, dairy, and even citrus and garlic are ok. No waste, all recycle. I like the idea. Right I am waiting for my Bokashi Bran to finish fermenting and be ready for use. That is what it seems like is happening, you hurry up and do something and then wait. It seems like forever. I guess I could be building more bins and setting up more "worm traps" around the yard. I just don't want to be buying any more worms. They are expensive. I also need to start gathering more "weeds" and composting them to feed to the worms.

I did get a few pictures on my phone that I need to post. I'll do that later in this post as an edit. I can do that from my phone but it is hard to type on my phone so it takes more time to take pictures and post them. That's all for today. 

 

That is the shoe box sized container that I drilled some holes in and layered with sphagnum peat moss. I added some cooked rice and some coffee grounds at the time of this picture. They finished all that and now I have an apple core and some strawberry tops in there. I added 50 worms to this bin and they are doing well.

Still Going Strong

I put about a cup of rice in my main bin (the 15 gallon fabric pot) and it is shrinking. There is a white fluffy mold growing all over it. From what I've read that is like worm candy. They supposedly go nuts for the stuff. I am actually getting a little worried that I may not be able to feed them enough.

I need to start cutting down the weeds around my house and feeding my compost pile or feeding them to the chickens. Then I could put the chicken poo in the compost pile. I wonder how fresh chicken poo would affect the worms. I know it can get hot but I wonder if small amounts would work ok. I am going to try a little in my outside bin to see how it goes.

We are up to 30 worms in the shoebox sized bin. There isn't much going on in there yet. It is see through so I can see a few of the worms hanging out at the bottom but not much going on there. I also fed them some rice. The outdoor tower farm got 10 more worms today and seems to be doing just fine.

The plan is to continue doing what I am doing and get some pictures up.

Surprising Results

Day before yesterday I placed a few pieces of strawberry and even a whole one that was going bad into the fabric pot that has the worms I ordered in it. This evening when I pulled back the cardboard on top there were no more strawberries visible. There are still pieces of the stems but no red. The cabbage I fed to them isn't disappearing very fast so maybe I should feed them more moist materials. I am pleasantly surprised at how well these worms are doing.

I am beginning to wonder if the other worms I've collected from the yard may be a different species or maybe the warmer indoor temperatures are preferred for the worms vigor. The outdoor bins seem to be doing ok too! They just haven't been fed strawberries for a long time. Tomorrow I am going to cut up a watermelon and give them some rinds. I've also got a pineapple I need to cut up. Not too sure the pineapple is the greatest thing to feed worms so I think I'm just going to feed it to the compost pile.

This is a really fun hobby and the work is so minuscule to care for them. I try to think of things to do for my worms because most of the time you just toss a little food in there and leave them alone for a few days. I am planning on building more bins soon so that I have more to do. That will also spawn many more worms who will make me tons of nutrient rich soil additive for my organic garden veggies and plants.

Action plan is to continue adding worms to my new bins.

What Do I Feed My Worms?

I just finished setting up my new experiment. I emptied the worm tower (I am not sure if that is the actual market name for my worm bin but it is a stackable one like a tower) besides the last tray and found around 30 worms that I added to it. I have a rubbermaid bin, without holes drilled in it, that I filled with leaf litter and branches a while back after it rained. Then I planted a tomato plant in it. The bin is about half full of water soaked leaves. When I dug around in the bin a little to see why the tomato was suffering is when I discovered that the worms were definitely reproducing in there. The large amount of water pooled in there is not too good for the plant though, I don't think. The point is that I have a bin that is producing red worms for me and I didn't even know. I am using the worms that I find in there to populate my worm tower.

While I was dumping out my tower I ran out of room in my 10 gallon bins so I used an old cardboard box from Costco to hold the last tray. Then I took some more of the rotting leaves like the ones I used on the other bin, the one with the tomato, and covered the remnants of the last tray. I am not sure if you call that bedding material or food, but since the worms eat dead decaying leaves that is how I will leave them until it is time to add more food to the tower.

I bought a few bags of peat moss to use as bedding material. I am not sure how I am supposed to use it but I plan on adding layers. I will probably add one inch of the peat moss then add about the same amount of composting material, and one more one inch layer of peat moss on top. The reason I am doing that is because I believe that the worms will eat the compost because of the microbes present in it. Another tidbit of info I am not sure about is what exactly the worms are eating. I have read that they eat food scraps and carbon based materials. I have also read that they don't have teeth so they can't bite anything solid. Since they can't take bites they need everything to be wet so they can slurp it down. Now I am not sure if they are eating solely microbes or if they actually chow down on things like watermelon.

There is so much information out there about what worms do, eat and live. They usually conflict with each other. I have even looked at university studies from around the world and even they cannot agree on what is actually happening in the worm bin. For example, I had a bin that I gave up on. I repurposed it to dry out some crabgrass that I had growing in the yard. When it rained I never dumped out the water. When I finally moved the old bin I noticed some worms floating around with the decomposing weeds. I thought that worms would drown in water. They must have come from the weeds or from the eggs that may have been left behind when I dumped the worms out (I didn't feel the need to clean it out real well for the weeds). Another thing that I read constantly was to not feed citrus to the worms. I didn't listen and all of the lemons, oranges and even onions that I fed to the worms eventually disappeared.

My point is that the experts are not all that schooled in the actual art of rearing worms. I think that many folks read a site or two and see how simple worms are to care for and just believe what they are told. They regurgitate that info to try and sell worms to someone else, for someone else. I don't think that the original articles or sites were completely invalid by saying that certain foods worms don't like or certain conditions must be met or the worms will die were intentionally deceptive. In fact most of them seemed to believe what they reported. The problem is that there are so many variables in every situation. The experts don"t always mention that the advice they give may work if there are many other factors already in place.

One thing I do know is that my worms never complain. They have gone up and down in population over the last few years. They have been baked in the sun, drowned in the rain, starved when neglected and overfed when I first began farming them. They have survived and thrived. Now I need to find out how to feed them to get them to reproduce at the highest rate possible. My plan is to feed them from my compost pile. The materials are already mostly broken down and should be easily broken down further by the worms and turned into the castings that every organic gardener wants in the garden.

Since I don't have an aged compost pile going yet I am relying on the leaf litter and some kitchen scraps to feed the worms. I want to see how fast they actually eat and how much they eat. I fed them some carrot peels about two weeks ago and they are all mixed in with peels but there seems to still be a lot of peels. I think that it has been too cold the last couple of weeks for the bacteria and fungus to really take hold and break down the peels. Of course that is only my opinion as is everything on this blog so far.

One of my problems is being patient. I want to see results and it seems to take forever with the worms. That is why I want to get the population of worms in the first tray up to full capacity. The worm gurus suggest around 1000 worms per square foot of bin area. The depth doesn't seem to matter much. Supposedly red worms live mostly on the surface so too much depth isn't going to be beneficial to my herd.

I am unsure if it is a good idea to have the worms climb up the tower or to have them climb down. They have been climbing so far but I haven't ever been able to let them finish eating all their food and bedding before adding another tray. I haven't been able to harvest any significant amount of pure castings. I have been collecting some of what appears to be castings where the leachate is supposed to gather. Some of the worms like to hang out in the leachate chamber and they breed down there sometimes.

Not too sure what is best for the worms or what exactly I expect from them but I am having fun learning about them. I have a 2 year old son who also loves to play with them. It is pretty weird to me to be playing with worms and dirt and getting so excited about it. I see the potential for healthy home grown fruits and vegetable, a source for learning, and eventually an income stream!

For now, another action plan:

1. Learn how to post pictures on my blog
2. Continue gathering worms for the tower bin
3. harvest some nutrient rich castings and put them to good use

Worms Are Loving It!

The worms are loving their new home. I am not sure if the worms just got bigger from the added water or if they already exploded their population. The Bin has tons of worms squirming to get out of the light and when I dig through a little I can't get a handful with no worms. I put some sphagnum peat moss in the fabric pot then put some compost from my other bin that isn't finished and I also put some soil amendments in there.

The amendments were 1/2 of a cup each of alfalfa pellets, gypsum, cal-phos, kelp meal, soft rock phosphate, and dolomite lime (I've read that is a death sentence for worms but they are thriving!). Once they arrived I put in some rosemary cuttings (excess from cooking), some strawberries that were starting to rot and some cabbage hearts (the part left over once you take the leaves off). I topped it off with some cardboard from some food packaging. I just opened the boxes up and laid them flat then poured some water slowly over the top and left them alone for three days. Today when I looked in there and dug around a little I was surprised and excited to see how many worms were squirming around making some good castings for me!

My 2 year old was helping me and we decided to make a small bin for him. We took a small shoe box sized plastic bin and put in some peat. We took some old grapes and put them in there with about 10 worms and covered them with more peat. Oh yeah, before adding the bedding, food and worms we drilled a few air vent holes. They are only about 1/8" holes. Hopefully that will be sufficient. I got that idea from a worm forum from a guy that said he'd been doing it that way for more than a decade. I took only a small amount of my stock to try this idea and if it works it may be a good project for other kids out there and something that my son and I can supply.

I am glad my boy enjoys the worms with me. He was hesitant about touching them at first but now he jumps in there and grabs them out to hold them and examine them. He is very gentle, even without being prompted. I've read that this is a great hobby for young kids and older ones too. It seems to be the case for me and my boy! My wife on the other hand isn't quite as thrilled as we are but she's not giving us a hard time or anything like that. She is only afraid that it is going to get smelly.

It is a valid concern since it has happened to us before. It happened before we had our son. We had a bad smell, and tons of those little fungus flies or gnats or whatever those pesky little flying devils are called. I believe that was do to me overfeeding the bin and it got too wet and went anaerobic. The gnats were attracted to the smell or came from the fruit I was adding. I haven't seen any flying insects in my bins for quite some time. They have been outside and I haven't been feeding them much fresh, as in not pre-composted, fruits and veggie scraps.

I have been giving these worms some fresh scraps and there haven't been any outbreaks of pests. I need to make sure that I don't over do it. I did notice that there is a good sized hole in a napkin that was recently placed in the bin. That amazed me since worms supposedly don't eat solids. Overall I am happy so far with my results.

What's next?

I am thinking about some of the guidelines I've read about worm capacities and the small bin I set up for my son is approximately 1/2 a square foot. So, the carrying capacity should be somewhere around 500 worms. We put 10 in there. We will add 10 more everyday and see what happens. I am not sure exactly what I am looking for or how to tell, without sorting through and counting all the worms, what the population is doing. I am planning as I type. My boy and I will add 10 worms til we have added 100 worms to the shoe box sized bin (pics coming soon!). A week from this Monday will be when we reach that goal of 100 worms. From there I guess we will decide if we want to start a new one or if it seems to be depleting my stock too much. If it is too much to supply 10 worms each day then we will need to let the population grow a little more before we try it again. This is going to be an estimate since there is no way I am going to spend my time counting up 1900 worms! In fact, I didn't even count to see if there were actually 2000 worms to begin with. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post the worms already seem to be doing particularly well so I don't see 10 worms per day being much of a problem. Only time will tell.

Gardening is difficult, just like raising worms, because there is a lot of waiting to see results. It is difficult when patience is not one of your strengths, like me. I want to see the results right now. I also want to have a production line going. It is difficult to do because I don't have any gauges except for my guesstimates. So, what I am getting at is that my action plan needs to include the inaction of waiting.

With that being said, my action plan is going to span about 3 weeks. I will add 100 worms over 10 days then wait an additional 10 days, while repeating this process with a new bin and then count up the first bin and see what the population is. After 3 to 5 of these I should be able to tell if my fabric pot bin is increasing or decreasing in population significantly, with 300 - 500 worms removed there should be a noticeable decrease. If it seems to be holding up well then I shall continue with this plan but if not I will adjust accordingly. In my next post I will be discussing some of my options as far as selling my worms or their castings or...? Let's see where this goes!

My Worms Have Arrived!

I ordered 2000 worms from Uncle Jim's Worms about 2 weeks ago now. It took about 10 days, from order placement, to get here. They were packaged in a simple little bag inside a cardboard box. It looked like there were no casualties. All the worms, as far as I could tell, were ready to get into their new bin and get to work! I placed them in a 15 gallon fabric pot  that I had partially filled with some peat moss and a small amount of kitchen scraps. I pored some water over them because they were shipped in a dry peat moss bedding.

The next day when I lifted the pot to see if there were any escapees and I found 2 worms underneath. I put them back in and have yet to find anymore runners! When I figure out how to post pictures I will and I will also post updates on how they are doing. I am really excited about these little farmers that are turning my scraps into garden gold!

I got these worms to help turn my decomposed granite garden sites into lush jungles of fruit and vegetable goodness. I also have a plan to grow the populations these red wigglers so that I can sell some. I am dreaming of a huge greenhouse that has worm bins under the pathways producing their castings for the plants growing there. Since I only have a small amount of worms right now I have more food than mouths to feed it to. When I have in ground worm beds full of red wigglers I am not sure that I will have enough to feed them. I can't wait to have too many worms to feed!

In the mean time I need to figure out how to track growth rates and how to inventory my stock. Oh yeah, I also am trying to keep my costs down. I want to use only waste materials to feed my worms. Also, I want to expedite the growth of my stock. I have a plan for that. I ordered worms so that I could see how they are shipped. I am able to find worms, for free, just by moving some leaves that have been mostly undisturbed for the last few years. The only problem I have with this method is that I am not able to be certain that the worms I find are red wigglers.

I am making an assumption based upon the research I have been conducting that shows that red wigglers are "compost worms" that feed on leaf litter and manure on the surface of the earth. Now I am sorting through ideas on farming them. I have been keeping worms for a few years now but I have been unable to produce the pure worm castings that I have bought at the garden centers. Actually, I have bought a few different brands. The one that seems to have the best consistency is the one I am attempting to emulate.

In my attempts I have run into some of the same problems that other folks are reporting on other sites. The main one being overfeeding and ending up with fungus gnats getting out of control. I have a stackable bin, with 4 trays, that I keep outside and I have 2 ten gallon rubbermaid style bins out there too. About a month ago I started a compost heap that I will eventually feed my worms.

I feel like I am starting to wander in this post. So, I will end it with a plan of action:

1. Empty my stackable bin into the rubbermaid tubs, except one tray. This will be my gauge.
2. Find more worms from around my property to fill the first tray to capacity (I am not sure how to tell what that is, but it is a goal).
3. Find a rate to feed that tray.

Again, when I figure out how to post pictures I will update where I am now and continue to show where I am heading. I am excited about this endeavor and rambling off too much about my potential paths but time will show what I find to be the best road to travel!

-- G.