How To Keep Track Of Your Worm Population

I need to learn how to keep track of my worm populations. I have a shoe box sized bin that has had 80 worms added to it. I started with a 1 1/2" or so layer of sphagnum peat moss. I added 10 worms a day for 5 days and also added 2 apple cores, some strawberry tops and peels from one apple. I may have also added a small piece of papaya. All that's left is some remnants of peels and some of the cores. I have been adding 10 worms a day for the last three days now bringing my total added to 80. I am going to let them grow on their own once I've added 100. I have heard that worms double their populations every 90 days but I don't know if that's exactly true. There is a good article over at http://www.redwormcomposting.com/general-questions/will-a-red-worm-population-double-in-3-months/ that does a good job of explaining that it is very difficult to determine how fast someone else's worm population will grow.

I don't know if I should harvest all of my worms at one and weigh them or if I should just keep harvesting them 10 at a time and see if the population I am taking them continues to grow or if it gets difficult to find worms in my bin. I am going to have to decide how to track my inputs too. I do have a small food scale I could use to weigh how much I am feeding and I could see how long it takes a certain population to devour what I add, then see how many worms there are after a certain amount of time. I have noticed a bunch of small worms in my bins lately.

I want to do so much with them but I have to wait for them to do something. They need to reproduce and grow. That redwormcomposting.com site has tons of great information on how to compost your kitchen and garden scraps with worms. The guy who put that site together has written about tons of different types of worm bins he has tried out over the years. I've been learning a lot from his site. Google Drive has a spreadsheet that I can use to track my worm population. I started a spreadsheet there and I will post a link to it later, in the comments, when I figure out how to do it. Please help me figure out how to improve on it. So far I only have the approximate date I received them and the amount I received plus the date I should have double my original population.

I am going to add a column that will account for the amount I feed them. I will also measure the castings that I harvest. A later project will be how to process them to get a consistent texture. Not sure how I am going to harvest them either. A post for another day. I've got to go figure out how to share that spreadsheet.

Worm Farm Patience

I am at the point where I have to wait for the worms to grow. They are doing well. I want the population to grow to the point where I can release a pound of worms into my trench and feel confident that I will have that many new worms in my bin, or in my overall population to replace them if something goes wrong. I need to figure out how to feed them properly to keep the population on the rise.

My focus is on growing the population right now. I have many small bins started right now. I don't have space in any one bin to house the whole herd. So, I am going to keep them where they are right now and continue to feed them individually. I have been wanting to try out an experiment with a bin soon. I want use a fabric pot and slowly feed it til I have it full of castings. I will then take out the worms by some method that I feel will do the job, and plant a seed in it. Then take the worms to a new pot where I will do the same thing. I want to do this for many pots and also have a bin producing castings for top dressing and worm teas.

I want to get more worms. That seems to be the hard part. Being patient while the worms grow. So, back to my plan. I will focus on feeding the stackable worm farm until I have all 4 trays full. Next I will focus on the fabric pot. I need a way to quickly estimate my numbers.I need a way to quickly harvest. Well, maybe I could just take my time. I am rethinking the stackable trays. I believe it has about 1 1/2 square feet of surface area and each tray is about 6 inches deep. I would guess that 2 to 3 thousand worms should be a good amount of worms for this system. Once I reach those numbers I will need to harvest some amount on some sort of schedule and start filling my other projects to capacity. Once I have enough where the trench is producing a fine garden then I will start selling my stock.

I need to prove to myself that these critters can make me look like a decent gardener. These castings need to prove themselves before I can honestly sell the worms for this purpose. If I come into a few extra dollars somewhere I may order more worms to help speed up the process and I may look into getting a local group together of about ten people and go in on a 10 pound shipment or something like that. I wouldn't mind doing that. I will try and set something like that up. Maybe I will do that and try to get my worms paid for. Maybe I could go to the swapmeet and sell worms, or craigslist, or ... ebay? Who knows, if the worms act like they are supposed to then the worst that could happen is I get to eat healthy fruits and veggies that I grow myself!

Some Interesting Research Findings

If you are seriously looking into using red worms for waste reduction, a gardening amendment, or to raise and sell worms then you've probably come across the site redwormcomposting.com. That site has tons of articles about the many different uses for red worms and other worms. Today I was reading a few of the articles and I came across a paper from some university, I'll see if I can find it again and put a link to it, and it gave me an important distinction in the direction worm farmers can take.

The realization came when I found out that there is a difference between vermiculture and vermicomposting. The first, vermiculture, is the act of raising a colony of worms while the second focuses on processing waste and turning it into a gardening amendment. The reason I bring this up is because I was wondering how to feed my worms appropriately. The answer was, of course, "that depends!"

What this has led me to is to focus first on vermiculture. I want a large population of worms so that I can process all of my waste and all the waste of those in my close proximity. In order to do this I need a substantial population. 1 to 2 pounds of worms per square foot of bin area is the recommended amount. So, with this new found information I must redirect my efforts. The day before yesterday I dug a trench and stuck a bunch of waste I had been composting in it. I had planned on adding some worms into it but now, that seems a bit silly. What I expect would happen is that my small population, in regards to the 10 foot long trench, would spread out and not see each other. That would result in slow population growth and overall slow decomposition.

The trench will remain in its current slow decomposition mode for now. I just started a Bokashi bucket. This is what I will be feeding to my worm farm as it ferments down enough. That is going to be a few months down the road. In the mean time I've got to keep feeding the worms. I have plenty of cardboard and junk mail handy but I don't have a ton of nitrogen rich material to add. I am going to have to use some chopped weeds or something. Even the weeds are going to be a little tough to come by since it hasn't been raining at all this year.

I read this morning that pig manure stimulated the most growth in populations of worms. Too bad I don't have a pig! Anyway, the Bokashi will eventually start mass producing a feed source soon enough. I will be able to scrounge up enough waste for my worms to at least sustain there current level, especially since I now know what I am aiming to do.

Just to make sure I am on the same page as myself, my goal is to grow my worm population so that I can sell worms and have a constant flow of nutrient rich castings. I want a vermiculture that also produces plenty of vermicompost. I want the best of both practices. My focus is on growing my current worm population to be able to consume the contents of a trench 1 foot wide, 10 feet long and 3 feet deep. So far I have been spreading them out to thin to allow them to reproduce at a sufficient rate. I need more patience or more money to buy more worms.

One last observation, I built a small bin out of a shoebox sized container and added 50 worms. It has been doing well but I think it would be doing better if I added 500 to 1000 worms. I would like to see my scraps disappearing daily instead of bi-weekly. I have 7 working bins right now. I will take from the less active bins and add those worms to the stackable farm. I will use that farm to create a large population to fill all of my 7 bins to capacity then begin working on expanding. There are 4 trays in my stackable farm, 3 filled and one emptied yesterday. I will add some peat moss to the empty tray and begin feeding there. I have two 10 gallon rubbermaid trays next the stackable farm that have worms. I will take 10 worms per day from there and add them to the top tray. I also have a large tub with a tomato plant growing in it that has no drainage and has chickens eating from it. I found a large cache of worms hiding in there that I will begin transferring over to the top tray as well.

I guess it would be wise to take measurements and see where my experiments are leading me and that is my number one downfall. I am almost incapable of keeping written records. It has always seemed like that was someone else's job to me. I am too good to do that. I think it is really just that I am too lazy and selfish to burden myself with that type of activity and my personal growth will most likely continue to suffer because of this shortcoming. I am enjoying this project on the other levels though. Who'd a thunk I was gonna be a worm farmer?

My Bokashi Experiment

I felt pretty brave and decided to make Bokashi Bran. I say brave because I made it all from home made ingredients, besides the wheat bran. That cost me about $20 for a 50 lb. bag. And Molasses, another $22 for a 5 gallon bucketful. At the whole food market they run about $10 for a liter or so. I bought both from some local feed stores. The lacto culture was the most sketchy part. I used rice wash in a mason jar to "catch" the lacto and then "fed" it some milk. Each step took around a week. Then I took the lacto and mixed it with some molasses and some water and mixed it into the wheat bran. I left that in an airtight bucket for three weeks to ferment.

The next part I drilled a few holes in a 5 gallon bucket and nested in another bucket the same size. I sprinkled some of the finished bran on the bottom of the "holy" bucket and threw some way over ripe bananas on there along with another dash of bran and placed a plastic bag on top of that mixture. I put a plastic pot saucer in the bag and a small ceramic pot on that to hold it down and keep it anaerobic.

That's where I am at right now. The plan is to put the finished Bokashi compost in my worm bins to feed my worms. The benefit of this method is to be able to compost more kitchen waste. Waste like bones and meat scraps, dairy and fats can all be "pickled" using the Bokashi method and then be safely fed to the worms.

We will see how this goes. So far I am pleased that my science experiment type of project has worked out like it should. No foul odors or strange colored molds, I am happy!