GardenDesk

The worms are multiplying - Babies!

We are really enjoying our Worm Factory Worm Composter. We have only had it a month but the worms have more than doubled already! If you want to see what the worm bin looks like, I showed several pictures of it on my last worm post.

My daughter has had a favorite kids book for years called Diary of a Worm. Now that we have been able to watch worms up close for a month, we understand the book a lot better. Now, it is pretty funny to us. What a great little book. For example, the instructions in setting up the bin had us put several sheets of wet newspaper as the very top layer of the bin.  Diary of a Worm begins with advice from a mother worm to her son. One thing she tells him is "Never bother Daddy when he's eating the newspaper."

As it turns at, that is so true. The worms love to eat newspaper! Look at what those three layers of newspaper look like after one month:

They also like to get up above the newspaper, between it and the plastic lid - so we added more moist newspaper.

Today we discovered the coolest thing of all. The worms not only like to eat newspaper and crawl between it and the lid, but they like to do other things there as well.

Look at all the babies! There are at least six or seven in this picture. They are so small that we would never have seen them without the newspaper as a backdrop.Here's a closeup of the above picture:

These baby worms are small but they are a lot longer than I would have expected. Below is a different picture. Notice that one baby is snuggled up next to an adult and another baby is a little to the right. It almost looks like a mom and her babies, doesn't it?

Did I just hear you say "aw, how cute"? If so, did you ever think you would think worms were cute?

I tell you, we are having much more fun with our worm bin than we expected. It's really easy to keep it going since the bin is right in our living space. We have already expanded to the 2nd tray. If you want to see how the bin is put together, my first worm post shows it in detail. I also cover other popular worm bin models like the famous Can O Worms.

I'm sure those other worm systems work well too, but we are very satisfied with our Worm Factory.

We are so new at keeping worms that it still seems odd to call it vermicomposting. That is what I like to call it though, because the whole reason for raising these worms is to be able to use the ultra-rich compost for the garden that they create. I first found out about vermicomposting from a garden blog, but I don't remember which one.

If you are a garden blogger and have ever written about raising worms, please let me know. Include the url to your post, label or category too if you can. We'd also like to hear from you if you've ever kept worms even if you haven't written about them. I want to learn all I can about this and tell as many gardener's as I can too.

Keeping worms is so easy and fun, every serious gardener should consider it! Please comment if you agree with me or even if you have questions.

Thanks,

Marc

The Worms are Doing Great!

My 1,000 new worms are safely settled in to their new home. These great red wiggler worms arrived just after my post about putting our new worm bin together. They are doing great in our new Worm Factory® Composter.

The worms seem happy and healthy. I think it is because the Worm Factory came with great instructions on how to set up the bedding to give the worms their best possible home. It also came with a block of coir, which has turned out to be a great bedding. I didn't know what coir was, but I found out from The Worm Book that it is the shredded fiber of coconut husks.

When you add water to the coir, it instantly swells up! My kids got a kick out of watching it grow so quickly. 

After it soaked up the water, I broke it apart and made sure it had even moisture.

The Worm Book by Loren Nancarrow and Janet Hogan Taylor, lists the advantages of using coir coconut fiber in worm bins. It says coir (also called coia) is great because it retains moisture like peat moss but of course is more of a renewable resource than peat. Coir also mixes well with other bedding, is odor free and clean, doesn't compact in the bin and has a good pH of 6 to 6.5. Nancarrow and Taylor states that the disadvantage of coir is that it is expensive. This worried me a bit because I want to buy additional coir for the bedding in the other trays of my worm bin. The cost of coir has recently gone up, but in the small quantities that I need for worm farming, cost is not bad. The cheapest I found was on amazon listed as Coco Garden CCF650 650-Gram Compressed Coco Fiber Growing Medium .

After the coir was evenly moist, I added some crushed egg shells and put the whole mix in the worm bin tray.

Next came a layer of shredded paper.

The last step to making the worm bed was to add a couple sheets of moistened newspapers. This is a great idea since it helps to keep the material underneath moist as well. It will also be easier to tell when I need to add water to the whole worm bin.

Finally, it was time to add the worms!

Every day since, we have added vegetable kitchen scraps in one side of the bin. You need to bury the scraps so the worms have easy access to them and so they don't smell. It has been shocking how fast soft foods like strawberry tops and eggplant pieces are consumed. Potato peelings and lettuce have been slower. In a weeks time, the worms have also digested much of the shredded paper and I assume they are also eating the coir.

I guess I should have stated this at the beginning, but this is the whole reason to have a worm bin. We have it located right in the kitchen so we can add compostable food scraps quickly and often. Each worm eats its body weight in food each day! Over time, the worms will supply us with rich vermicompost that we can add to the garden! Worm castings are amongst the best of organic soil conditioners.

I will write more about the benefits of raising worms as I learn more about them. Like I mentioned earlier, I am reading The Worm Book . I am also re-reading the classic Mary Appelhof book, Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up and Maintain a Worm Composting System.

I was also able to find a new book on raising worms as a business called Profitable Earthworm Farming. A similar book, Raising Earthworms for Profit was actually the first worm book I read. It is a great book which got me very excited about raising worms!  I'm not sure that I want to be in the worm-selling business, but I do want to expand my worm farming as much as possible in order to get more worm castings from them. These books will help me turn my 1,000 worms into 15,000 worms in a year. If I create space for them, in two years I could potentially have half a million worms! That's a lot of vermicompost! I definitely don't want to buy any more redworms. They are sold some places for up to $50 per pound (1,000 worms). At least I found 1,000 Red Wiggler Live Composting Worms from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm on Amazon for around $25.

Maybe worms would be good to raise for profit. Discussion for another day.

In the meantime, I will feed and visit my worm bin daily. Even our cats like to watch them wiggle.

I want to keep them healthy so I don't need to buy any more. There is one thing I would like to purchase for them though. I worry that I'm injuring them when I dig my hand through them to bury the food. I want to buy a Hand Compost Turner/Cultivator. It is less than $1.00 and using it would be safer for the worms. They probably sell this so you don't have to touch the worms. That doesn't bother me.

Don't they look great? I know, I'm like a proud pet owner. I'm sure I'll write more about them later!

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