It's been a long time and a lot of things have happened to my worms in that time. I am back at it with an intent to make a profit selling my excess.
In order to produce massive castings I am in need of many thousands of worms. The food to feed all these worms, in a form that is easy for them to process into nutrient-rich plant food, costs money.
The worms that process the organic matter for the garden are valuable.
By setting up a castings factory I am also able to simultaneously produce massive amounts of worms, enough to sell and make money to feed the rest.
Actually, I want to do more experiments and I want to have a shop or a business that sells worms and related products.
I am going to develop a simple system that both produces worms for sale and castings for my personal needs.
I may be able to sell some of my harvests of worms and maybe even some of the bedding that is what grows my next round of worms.
As of today, it is going to take me approximately 1 month to have worms to take to market.
I have enough worms now but I don't have a system to grow them and have a solid plan for raising the next generation.
I am going to explain in words for now what I am doing to raise my worms for selling on ebay.
These are compost worms. I have never used them for fishing but they may work.
I raise them for their castings. I can buy bedding, food, and amendments for them with the money I make selling them.
With the compost systems I am running, I should have plenty of food to keep the worms healthy but it doesn't make a uniform product until I have a good system in place to have the compost finish and be harvestable.
Let me explain better, I have been just feeding a bin that hadn't been fed for a while and all the bins are a mix of finished and unfinished compost.
I am focusing on growing worms for sale.
I am starting bedding composed of peat moss and Kellog's brand garden soil.
I am adding some oyster shells, kelp meals, alfalfa meals, rock dust, and crustacean shell meal.
I have a 2-gallon pot that I use to measure out a 50/50 mixture of garden soil and peat moss. I then add one handful each of the mentioned amendments and sometimes others.
As I build my bins up to be more of a system that produces more castings that are easier to harvest I will be using more and more of my own homemade compost. I can use more castings all the time and they are valuable. It isn't very cost effective to be shipping compost all over the place but the worms I will be naturally producing can be shipped and reproduced over and over again easily. That way all the castings can be produced on site.
By going over each task that I do and why I am doing it I will help myself better define my tasks and make my systems more effective but also show others what works and what to avoid.
I have been raising worms for many years and I know what they are capable of. I have never organized my processes to fully take advantage of their casting producing abilities or their rapid reproduction to be able to sell either.
I now have a solid plan to produce all the castings I could possibly need and have enough worms to sell to be able to feed them enough to produce all the castings I need.
I don't have a scale yet to see how much vermicompost I need but I have a plan to get a product. It will be at least 3 weeks before I have anything ready for harvest.
I am putting together a plan for the bedding I am creating and how I am going to implement it.
While thicker stems and seeds may take extra long to break down it is still easier to work with the worms when they are large and the medium is uniform.
I mean, I don't want to be digging through rotten pumpkins and bananas while separating my worms from their bedding and cocoons.
The worms in the breeder bins that are being grown for sale and breeding will be fed a different diet than the worms composting my kitchen scraps and junk mail.
The compost will eventually be mixed in with bedding and eventually processed through the breeder bins too.
I don't know yet how I am going to separate the cocoons from the castings. I may have to process the cocoons differently after they've been through the same bedding a few times. Or, it may end up working itself out as I mix in bedding and separate them out. It may be possible to sell the bedding full of cocoons at some point too.
I am still working out a good system to sort out the Worm Factory trays too.
I have 2 worm factories and 8 total trays. I am looking at dumping 1 tray into my black bin, and filling it with another black bin's contents.
After I've filled the 4 trays of one farm I'll begin filling the next 4, 1 per day.
At the same time, I will begin dumping one tray, from the oldest tray to the newest, at a rate of one per day.
I may start filling the trays with one part of my bedding mix and one part compost bins mixture.
That way, when the fourth tray is dumped in I can start using that mix to supplement for the garden soil in order to get my bins processed into black gold for my garden.
After it goes through my breeder bins 3 or 4 times it should be ready to be put in the garden.
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