Vermiculture Blog.

Worms aren't just good for the garden.

2008-06-29T04:59:00.000-07:00

Irritable Bowel Syndone (IBS) increases from one in 10,000 to one in 250 in societies where the people don't have worms. Reintroduction of worms into IBS sufferers cured most of them. New York Times story.

BioPods

2008-06-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

One problem with worm farming is soldier fly infestations. BioPod hasn't looked for a solution for soldier flies, it's looked for a use. They can eat a wider range of foods more quickly than worms. Their castings can then be fed to a worm farm. The worms will reprocess it making nice, earthy vermicaste that we are comfortable with.

So, how do worm farmers use this to our advantage. Soldier fly larvae (SFL) are considered the enemy for many worm farmers. This attitude towards SFL means that they are a problem to deal with. We limit foods they prefer, weed them out, kill them off, struggle, fight, scratch and generally waste time trying to get rid of them.

BioPod lets us embrace their strengths. Worm farms with SFL will process a wider range of food wastes more quickly. That is good! The worms will re-process the SFL castings section of the bed in the fullness of time.

Wading pool gardens.

2008-06-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

City Farmers use any amount of available space to grow food and get in touch with natural cycles. Having a tub, pot or wading pool garden would be a perfect use of vermicaste. The worm farm (you could make one of the pools into a worm farm) would compost all the garden waste. You would know that the scraps you are feeding to the worms doesn't have any pesticide on it so the vermicaste and leechate wont contain harmful chemicals.

Worms at work.

2008-06-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

Californians are encouraged to keep worm farms at work. This is a great way to keep food scraps and paper out or land fill.

Kris' horizontal migration bin.

2008-06-03T16:50:00.000-07:00

Kris has put pictures on photobucket of her simple, inexpensive horizontal migration bin to allow for harvesting of vermicast without physically sorting or sifting out worms.

Cheap and easy home made worm bin.

2008-06-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

This page gives instructions for the construction of a cheap worm farm.

Reproduction Experiment.

2008-06-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

"How many worms is enough to start?" This is a common question from people new to vermiculture. Bentley Christie at Red Worm Composting decided to see what would happen it he started a worm farm with just 4 worms. It was a good result. In less than 6 months he had 100 worms in a new worm farm. If you take 100 and divide it by 2 five times you get 3.125. So, the reproduction rate on worms seems to be a doubling in numbers every month if there is no food or space constraint. Another 6 months and there would have been 6400 worms in the bin is they'd continued to double in numbers monthly. This has been extrapolated simply by multiplying 100 by 2, then 200 by 2... and so on. Obviously there are more variables than you can poke a stick at in vermiculture so mathematical projections are theoretical at best but interesting all the same.

Industrial Scale Worm Farms

2008-05-31T05:13:00.000-07:00

Tat-G Pty Ltd make industrial worm farms for use in any industry that creates organic waste.

Wooden Worm Farm

2008-05-30T05:23:00.000-07:00

This is a nice looking verticle flow worm unit made from wood. The each wooden layer has a mesh bottom. To harvest remove the upper trays until you get to the lowest tray. Empty that tray then use it as the top tray. You just keep feeding them instead of trying to sort them out of their bedding when the bin is full.

Mini Worm Farms

2008-05-19T02:21:00.000-07:00

A mini worm farm might be a good way to explore vermicomposting.

From.

A worm farm from a wheely bin - very simple

2008-05-15T06:35:00.000-07:00

Setting up an simple bin.

2008-05-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

An instructional video on setting up a simple, inexpensive worm bin.

Wikipedia Page

2008-05-07T06:07:00.000-07:00

The wikipedia page on vermicompost gives lots of info on worm farming.

Put yourself on the map.

2008-05-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

Vermicomposters lets you put yourself on the map to see who's vermiposting how much and where.

An update on the African Nightcrawlers in a Can-O-Worms

2008-04-25T01:58:00.000-07:00

This seems a good time to report on my african nightcrawlers in a can-o-worms project. To recap: There was much talk of whether it could be done or not so I bought two lots of 25 african night crawlers from the fishing store and put them in a can-o-worms to see what would happen. There is much talk of them being earth- rather than compost worms, not heat tolerant, prone to wanderlust, and so on... I wanted to know and figured that doing would give a definative answer. If the very worst came to the very worst I'd just have wasted a few dollars on the worms and some establishment time on converting it to red wrigglers.

I am happy to report that the african nightcrawlers are thriving in their can-o-worms. It was a bit touch and go in the beginning. It seemed that they had all died but they recovered. They seemed to want to be in the collector tray all the time but the second level seems to have fixed that problem. I thought they may have been escaping because I found some worms on the concrete nearby but this doesn't seem to happen any more.

Currently the second level is about half full. My friend wanted to start a can-o-worms with african nightcrawlers. I went to my can-o-worms to collect a few for him. I was struggling to find enough. With red wrigglers it is often possible to find a knot of worms under a particularly tasty bit of food. I was hoping to find a similar knot of african nightcrawlers. It wasn't looking good until I looked in the second tray. It was thick with worms! Big fat worms all through the castings. This explains how they get through so much food. They were huge!

So, my theory is that they come up at night ('cause they're nightcrawlers. .. yes?) and munch through all their food (I know they don't really munch).

Two handfulls of bedding and worms later and my friend's wormfarm was off to a good start.

Mesa Lane's home made worm farm.

2008-03-31T21:28:00.000-07:00

Mesa Lane's blogger contacted me via the yahoo group 'Worm Bin' to show me some pics of their home made worm farm. The blog offers a good howto on feeding and some good pics of the worm farm itself.

Worm bin from a Otto/Wiz/Wheely Bin

2008-03-30T05:04:00.001-07:00

The Ceres worm farm is made from a Wiz Bin. It is a verticle through-put system (in the top and out the bottom). The baffle allows the controlled harvest of vermicast.

Wonder Worm Waste Management offer a similar bin.

African Nightcrawler Can-O-Worms establishment.

2007-11-28T04:59:00.000-08:00

We've just gotten back from a 3 week motorhome (that's Austrailian for RV) tour of relatives, friends and wineries. I was worried that the new African Nightcrawler would all die from neglect in their new Can-O-Worms home. I underestimated their durability.

They had done more than survive. They'd eaten their cut lunch of vegetable scraps on cardboard and started breading. Baby african nightcrawlers are just so cute. :D

The numbers are still too low to make the worm farm of much use but their numbers are building. The day after adding food they had formed an eager knot under it.

Reln FAQ

2007-10-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

Reln make the Can O Worms. Here is there FAQ.

Baby nightcrawlers :)

2007-10-28T16:43:00.000-07:00

After one month of keeping African Nightcrawlers in a Can O Worms I spotted two baby worms. They were less than an inch long wandering around looking cute. This is a really good sign. A heard has to like its surrounds and food sourse to reproduce. If the eggs were with the worms that I bought it is still a good sign. The environment must have been comfortable (not too hot and the right pH) for the eggs to have hatched and the babies to have survived.

Wearable worms

2007-10-26T06:35:00.000-07:00

Cafepress now has everything. Wearable worm art.

Instructions

2007-10-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

A vermiposting how-to.

Feeding worms.

2007-10-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

If you are fattening worms for faster breeding, storage or to give a bin some extra food if you are going away you might want to make up a batch of worm fattener to keep them fat and happy. My goal for worm farming is to turn my rubbish into fertiliser instead of land fill, not to make worms fat. Each to their own though.

Worm Fattener Recipe from Worms of Endearment

1 part agricultural lime, bone meal, or powdered oyster shell (available at nurseries)
2 parts wheat or corn flour
2 parts bran or wheat meal
2 parts alfalfa meal or pellets (available at nurseries or feed stores)
2 parts chicken layer pellets

When I was at the tackle and bait shop buying african nightcrawlers the owner showed me a mysterious substance that his worm grower provides him for feeding the worms he is holding. What he didn't realise was that he was being buying polenta at a substantial markup. Cunning as a frog!

An excellent educational worm farm.

2007-10-22T05:41:00.000-07:00

The nice people at wormswrangle.com are selling a see through worm farm suitable for worm farming demonstrations.

A good home made single tray worm farm.

2007-10-18T04:55:00.000-07:00

Boreal Wormers' site shows a feeding pattern for a home made single level worm farm. My big problem with a singel level worm farm is the loss of eggs and younger worms during the seperation process used to harvest the vermicaste. Allowing the worms to migrate horizontally from one side to the other to allow harvesting of half of the bin might assist with this loss of young worms and eggs.

I'm not saying I have a better solution... I just don't think that this will work well. Maybe I'm just buying in on the Can O Worms idea too heavily. :)

Worm Farms in Foam Boxes

2007-10-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

This is an New South Wales Environmental Protection Agency instruction for making a work farm from foam brocolli boxes. I have made two. I kept one and gave the other to a friend. Both are still going strong.

Composting

2007-10-17T07:14:00.000-07:00

Composting and worm farming are different but similar. With composting often you are looking to generate heat to help with the breakdown process of organic material. This level of heat is sufficient to kill a worm herd.

As with vermi-posting, composting uses organisms to eat organic material. This is why you get slaters, fungi, beetles and bacteria in there. Sometimes cockroaches will be attracted to the bins. Often these are native insects and a sign of a healthy garden. If they are huge, scary cockroaches then burying food scraps and giving the bin a dose of ag lime will probably get rid of them.

You can turn your composte often or just leave it as I do. Turning it will make the process quicker. Lazy patience is my preference. :)

For me the point of composting is to keep organic material out of the dump.

Vermiposting Cat Litter.

2007-10-11T20:25:00.000-07:00

Eric has done an enormous amount of work, analysis and research on vermiposting cat faeces.

Frogs will eat your worms

2007-10-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

Frogs are ground predators. They will catch and eat worms if they find them. Because of this worm farms need to be frog proof. If a frog moves into your worm farm you'll need to catch and move it because they will eat all of your worms as they come to the surface in to eat.

African Nightcrawlers

2007-10-10T06:31:00.000-07:00

Recently I wandered by the tackle and bait shop looking for some red or tiger worms to freshen up the herds in one of the bins. I just wanted to kick the bins along a little after having split two worm bins into five. This left the populations a little depleted.

To my suprise they were selling African Nightcrawlers as bait. I understood that they made good bait I just wasn't expecting them to sell them. Remember, biases don't need to make sense. Anyway, I thought I might buy some to see how they would go.

My initial plan was to clear out one of the Can-O-Worms bins and pop them in there. Easy. :) However, then I developed some doubts. I wondered if the red worms in the Can-O-Worms would like that. I convinced myself that I would have enough food for another worm farm. So, off I went to the hardware store half hoping that they would be out of worm farms all together to save me from buying one. As luck (good or bad) would have it they had a Can-O-Worms.

Part of the reason for wanting a good home for the African Nightcrawlers stems from their notorious reputation for nocturnal wunderlust. Often I read of reports of half the herd being dead and shrivelled on the ground around the worm farm when the worm herders do the morning rounds.

With the first 25 African Nightcrawlers settled in I added another 25 today. Buying from a bait shop is an expensive way to buy worms but these are an interesting breed and I'm totally hooked on them. They have burrowed into and eaten some of the coir bedding supplied with the Can-O-Worms and started eating some of the scraps of food and weeds I have given them just to started them off. I am being careful not to overfeed them as I do not want the bedding to become acidic as this would encourage their natural wunderlust.

Good things about African Nightcrawlers:
. the name!
. heat tolerant
. better bait as they are bigger and not as slimey as red wrigglers (I do not fish so this point is for people interested in fishing)
. they are HUGE! They grow to about 8 inches in length
. they leave larger, more aerated castings.

Bad things:
. they are escape artists
. they are less common so there is less information out there about them
. they are not strictly surface dwellers so castings harvesting may prove more difficult than with red wrigglers who really like to be near the surface.

Link for a full Can-O-Worms instructional booklet - 2 meg pdf.

Harvesting Pics

2007-10-08T17:33:00.000-07:00

Gary has put some pics of manual vermicast/worm harvesting up on photobucket. It looks like hard work.

Harvesting a non-layered wormbin.

2007-10-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

I understand that alot of people like to just have a box with worms in it. However, when it comes time to harvest the vermicaste Amy's style of worm box creates a lot of work.

An hour and a half! It takes a few minutes to harvest a tray from a Can-O-Worms. This method of vermiposting is just too labour intensive for me. I think I would stop feeding them from dread of having to do this job. I have 3 Can-O-Worms bins and 2 Worm-A-Roo bins. Any one of these bins can be harvested in a few minutes. If you go to harvest your Can-O-Worms and find that the worms are still in the tray you want to harvest it is easy to just do it another day. They might be in a lower tray because they felt a bit hot or because they knew it wouldn't rain that day so they are off for a bit of exploration... who knows. Chances are that they will not be in the lower trays for long.

Another problem I find with the idea of manually seperating worms from their castings is that any tumbler as shown on Amy's site must allow some of the worm eggs and new born worms through. This is a whole generation of worms that are being thrown out into the garden where they are unlikely to survive or don't fit into the eco-system.

I have stopped throwing away all organic waste. I only put my bins out once every 6 weeks or so unless they get smelly. This is compared to every week like my neighbours. To put that much rubbish through worm farms that have to be sorted manually would mean that I would be spending hours every week emptying worm farms. It is most important to know yourself and I know that I would get sick of doing that very quickly.

So, my advise, for what it is worth, is to spend a little extra so that you can fully enjoy your hobby and get the maximise the environmental benefits.

More than worms.

2007-10-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

Many worm bins have more than just worms. Woodlice also break down organic materials into compost that is good for your garden. Often the larger creatures in a worm or compost bin are only the visible members. Once they have eaten your organic waste, other creatures will consume their waste and so on until you have the final product.

Pictures of Worms

2007-10-06T19:47:00.000-07:00

The nice people at Nurturing Nature have made up a page with pictures of various worms often used for vermiculture. This might help in identifying what kind of worms you have.

Worm Scams (no, really)

2007-10-04T00:51:00.000-07:00

Many people approach the whole topic of vermiculture as a way to make a quick buck.

Now, because everyone wants to make a quick buck many people are attracted to this idea. It is often offered in terms of turning rubbish into money and there are guarantees on the buy prices offered. This really needs to be looked at in terms of outwork at slavery rates of pay. There are successful large scale worm farms in existence and I am sure that there are people who will say I'm wrong because they are making money from vermiculture.

That said, people are being offered guaranteed incomes if they buy industrial size worms farms from worm farm makers. This is often about selling an overpriced worm farm rather than setting the buyer up with an independent income. If you are looking at this be very sceptical. If they are for real they should be able to produce existing clients who can show you that they are producing sufficient volume to justify the expence of the worm farm. An investment should return your capital to you within the working life of the machinery. Remember you have to take a cut from this for living expences.

Simply, if there was good money in worms I wouldn't be in shares. :)

RedHen's Helpful Can-O-Worms Pictorial Setup Guide

2007-10-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

RedHen has been kind enough to make a pictorial guide to setting up a worm farm. I have three Can-O-Worm brand worm farms (COW). One I have had for 11 years or so. Two of the farms (inculding the oldest COW) have red wrigglers (Eisenia foetida). Within the last week I have started a new bin with African Nightcrawlers (Eudrilus eugeniae). These worms are apparently difficult to grow as they have a habit of dying in the cold and escaping but I thought I'd give them a go just for something different.