I’ve been gifted with a worm farm from my goddaughter. (She moved in with her dad and the big ol’ meanie won’t let her bring her worms!) They’re under my sink now, in a custom made plastic box with air holes. They came with a bunch of coffee grounds, some old newspapers and I threw in some green bean ends (from my garden!) and a few potato eyes today. WhyBaby’s a little scared of them, but she loves the Rice Krispie sound they make. (No, really! A worm farm makes SOUNDS! It’s really weird.)
I have no idea what kind of worms they are. They’re red and skinny - skinnier than the worms outside. I’ve been told they can process food about up to “there” (halfway up the box) and they’re not picky about what they eat, but don’t put in banana peels 'cause that attracts fruit flies.
And that’s really it. I have no idea exactly what to do with a worm farm, but here we are!
Kewl. I had a worm farm once; I needed to raise 'em to feed a box turtle.
[ul][li] What you’ve got are the classic “red wigglers”.[/li][li] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida[/li][li] A.K.A., somewhat unglamorously, as “manure worms”, because that’s their chosen habitat, out under the cowman’s manure pile.[/li][li] So they aren’t your classic “earthworm”, but who cares.[/li][li] They are the classic fish bait worm. If you go to Mike’s Bait Shop and purchase a styrofoam cup of “fishin’ worms” for a dollar, this is what’s inside.[/li][li] They are the classic composting worms. Their poo is pure garden gold. Hoard it carefully, and don’t let your gardening neighbors know you have it, or else they’ll steal it.[/li][li] What you have going on under your kitchen sink is known as “vermiculture”. Toss that around at the next cocktail party. “I have vermiculture under my kitchen sink!”[/li][li] They LOVE potato peelings.[/li][li] You propagate them by raking aside the bedding and picking out the excess inhabitants, which you then can (a) feed to a box turtle, (b) feed to sunnies down at the pond by hanging them on a convenient hook attached to a stick and a string, (c) use to start another worm farm, (d) repatriate out in your tomato patch, or (e) all of the above, because you’ll have lots.[/li][li] Worm sex. You don’t want to know. Google it if you absolutely must know.[/li][li] They leave eggs behind, in the bedding. So don’t ever throw away all the bedding. Add shredded newspaper as required, when it starts to look like “all poo”, because they need bedding, not poo, to rummage around in. Put the poo-ful, egg-containing bedding out in the tomato patch, then stand back as your tomatoes seek to emulate Triffids. [/li][li] a $20 paper shredder from Wal-Mart is dandy for producing mass quantities of shredded newspaper. Don’t use magazines as the pigments in the inks can be toxic. [/li][li] Be sure you feed them. They’re not like goldfish, where you can ignore them for weeks at a time; they need a smallish handful of food every day. They eat a lot. Worm sex uses a lot of calories, evidently. [/li][li] Feed them any kind of peeling. Celery tops. Tomato cores. Basically any fruit or veg scraps that you wouldn’t eat yourself, get into the habit of dropping it into the worm farm. No meat, oils, fats, dairy, or grains. [/li][li] Avoid the fruit fly problem by sticking the banana peels under a layer of poo-ey bedding. You don’t have to bury it totally, just kinda cover it up. Fruit flies will not excavate into worm poo, they do have some standards.[/li][/ul]
[li] They leave eggs behind, in the bedding. So don’t ever throw away all the bedding. Add shredded newspaper as required, when it starts to look like “all poo”, because they need bedding, not poo, to rummage around in. [/li][/QUOTE]
Does the poo look sorta like coffee grounds? 'Cause I know there are some coffee grounds in there (smell, plus, she told me so), but it kinda looks like a whole bed of coffee grounds with some dirty newspapers on top.
No kidding! She and I both started a bunch of tomatoes on the very same day. Two months later, mine were huge and thick and gorgeous (thanks to good grow lights as babies, mostly) and hers were poor straggly little things. Before we left for vacation, her otherdad put a few handfuls of “worm poo” (he used the more genteel term “worm casings”) in her tomatoes, and when we got back two weeks later, hers had caught up to mine! Crazy healthy growth!
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[li] Feed them any kind of peeling. Celery tops. Tomato cores. Basically any fruit or veg scraps that you wouldn’t eat yourself, get into the habit of dropping it into the worm farm. No meat, oils, fats, dairy, or grains. [/li][/QUOTE]
Do I need to mix the stuff in, or just drop it on top of the “soil”? Ditto for the newspaper shreddings.
Thanks so much for the information and advice, that rocks!
One other question: do you know what the sound is? Is it munching or defecating or movement or gasp worm sex? Inquiring preschoolers want to know!
I recently spent time with my nieces–aged 3 and 5. While there is no worm farm, we did spend lots of time relocating the local wiggly-worms from the front flower garden to the brand new vegetable garden.
This had several purposes–entertain children, aid the growth of the veggies, and permit children to “help” without interfering with the adults ability to accomplish whatever we were trying to accomplish. (The adults spent lots of time digging up an old brick walkway and the ground underneath in preparation for a new brick walkway–which we hope will be completed before the snow falls, but as is characteristic of DIY plans, has already taken longer than planned and cost way more than expected. One of my nieces never shuts up and therefore was at risk mostly when someone was doing something noisy, but the other one is quiet and nearly got herself bonked in the head with a shovel more than once).
ETA: But it was fun to see my nieces squeal with excitement and run to the backyard with worms, while their mother worked to desensize herself to worms.
Kinda hard to describe, but…when you look in there, the worms ought to all be concealed in the bedding. And if you move the top layer of bedding, you still shouldn’t see very many worms, and the ones you do see should move quickly away from the light and down into the bedding. But when the facilities start to get up to 100% capacity, you’ll look in there and maybe see worms on top of the bedding, or when you move the top layer, they won’t move away but will just lounge there, staring at you, because there’s nowhere for them to go, it’s Full Up at the lower levels. Generally you should have a proportion of (this is gonna get real technical now, so brace yourself) Mostly bedding to Some worms. If you look in there and it seems like it’s Mostly worms to Some bedding, and especially if the newspaper is totally black and doesn’t look like newspaper any more (which means it’s at its carrying capacity for poo) then it’s time to relocate some of them.
No. The poo looks like poo. It’s gray-black, and slimy. Think “worm casting” (BTW, it’s casting, not casing, was that a typo?) Worm poo tends to stick to the newspaper, being, um, sticky, like poo, so you’re not going to see little individual worm turds like hamster droppings or whatever–what you actually see is just increasingly black and sticky-coated bedding.
The coffee grounds are coffee grounds. You can give them tea leaves, too, but you gotta pop open the teabag, makes it easier.
You’re not going to have a separate harvest of poo–it’s going to be all stuck to the newspaper. You don’t need to be in there carefully poking around looking for separate worm droppings, life is too short. The newspaper basically turns into poo, is the best way of thinking about it. I always liked to mix it (the old, poo-laden bedding) in a bit into the top layer of soil, because that way I’m sure the nutrients are getting into the soil, and not simply washing around on the top of it. The paper part of it is well-rotted by zillions of ecstatic microorganisms by the time hundreds of worms have finished using it as a toilet, so you don’t have to worry about newspaper all over your tomato patch. Just mix it in a bit and it’ll vanish fast.
I always assumed the sound was the noise of them moving through the newspaper. Because they do move, constantly. Move and eat, move and eat. When they’re not intertwined in the hot throes of worm passion, they’re moving. And eating.
Moving and eating, moving and eating. With the occasional pause to fuck. Such is life in the Worm Universe.
P.S. A “whole bed of coffee grounds with some newspapers on top” is FAR too many coffee grounds to bedding, egad. You need to drastically rearrange this. I’d pull out the newspapers, set them aside carefully as they have worm eggs and baby worms in there, carefully rescue any live worms you see, then dump out the coffee grounds onto a sheet of newspaper or something (rescuing worms as you go), then put in fresh bedding, then the old bedding and the rescued worms, and then–put a couple handfuls of coffee grounds on top. Don’t care what you do with the excess coffee grounds, but you can’t put that much in there at once, it’ll just putrefy and poison them. Even something called a manure worm has its limits for how much pollution it can take, and rancid, moldy coffee grounds are right up there. They’re not a garbage disposal, they’re living creatures with habitat requirements, and one of their requirements is to not live IN garbage. You can feed them garbage on top, but they can’t live in it.
And coffee grounds are acidic, and too much “acidic” isn’t good for them, it slows them down. Rancid coffee grounds are not good for them, either. The factoid “worms will eat coffee grounds” means, “You can toss your morning’s coffeepot worth of grounds into the worm farm”, not, “McDonalds can toss their entire week’s worth of coffee grounds into the worm farm”. A small handful of fresh grounds a day, not mass quantities of rancid grounds once a week.
Also, they’re basically surface feeders, they look “Up” for food, not “Down”. They’re not gonna eat something that’s buried deep-down below them.
Also, coffee grounds are wet, and they add substantial quantities of moisture to the bedding, which is sometimes good, but not if it’s a whole substratum of soggy grounds–you’ll get standing water, which means the worms will stage an evacuation if conditions aren’t remedied. --Yes, dear, that means they’ll start leaving the tub like rats leaving a sinking ship. If you ever walk into your kitchen and see worms fleeing from under the sink, that means you done something wrong and they’re Not Happy and they are voting with their feet (so to speak).
See, (passionate lecture) this is why vermiculture gets a bad name, because people like your goddaughter’s parental unit hear someone say that fishin’ worms can eat garbage, so they drop a dollar’s worth of fishin’ worms in a Sterilite box on top of a big honkin’ truckload of coffee grounds, and then wonder why they don’t get a tubful of miraculous garden fertilizer, just a lot of dead worms.
end of passionate lecture. I realize you inherited the worm farm. Now go fix it.
Remember to feed them stuff besides coffee grounds.
A healthy red wiggler should…um…wiggle vigorously when you pick it up. A red wiggler on the palm of your hand should be squirming and flopping and rolling around with at least some semblance of energy. If you pick up a worm and it just lays there in your hand, it’s Not Happy.
Just so’s you’ll know.
If you’re rescuing worms from the Great Coffee Overdose, and they’re just laying there, floppy and unresistant, when you pick 'em up, they’re Not Happy.
The biggest culprit in beginner worm farms is too much water. The second biggest is not enough water.
Well, the stuff looks “like” coffee grounds, but it isn’t all coffee grounds really. I think it’s just good dark aerated (very aerated!) dirt, if it’s not worm poop. She’s had the farm going for over a year now, and like I said, the stuff put on her tomatoes was awesome stuff, so they seem to be quite happy.
There’s no one living on top. When my daughter wants to see worms, I have to dig down a tiny bit and look around for one, as they do like to slither away from the light, so I don’t think they’re at capacity at the moment. They’re *very *wiggley - I wouldn’t let her pick one up because of what the wiki article said it might “exude a pungent liquid” in defense, but it was very wiggley when I picked it up with a green bean to give her a better look at it.
She got to feed them a bunch of green beans from the garden today - while I was away, some of the beans got a little more mature than we like them. Still edible by human standards, but a little tough; I’m sure the wigglers will be happy with them. I told her just to toss them in gently, but she lined them all up like a buffet! I noticed the potato eyes look more dirty and nibbled on, so I assume they’re eating them.
One thing I’m going to have to get into the habit of is getting a newspaper! We get all our news online or from The Daily Show, so we don’t have newspapers hanging around. At least one of my neighbors gets something delivered, though. I’ll ask around and see if they want to donate old papers to The Worm Farm.
Do you add water, or is the water in the produce enough?
If you’ve got them in a ventilated plastic box with a lid, generally all the moisture they need, unless you’re living in the desert, is to make sure the newspaper is damp. Not wet, not soggy, just damp. Moist. You can do this by spraying it with a plant mister and stirring it around a bit. Pretend you’re tossing a salad.
This usually means that when you put fresh newspaper in, you need to get it pretty wet at first (not soggy, not dripping, just “really damp”). As you can see, there are gradations. Too dry is better than too wet because you can always add water, but it’s practically impossible to remove water. Blowing a fan on it won’t help because the water pools at the bottom. I had my worm farm in a plastic cement mixing tub in the basement up on blocks on a concrete floor, so I punched holes in the bottom of the tub ruthlessly with a bigass screwdriver–wham! wham!wham!–and then never had to worry about overwatering, as any excess would drip out through the holes.
So anyway, once you get the bedding to the desired level of moisture, you usually don’t need to add water. The water in the produce is enough. You just gotta monitor it, see.
If the stuff in the bottom is just dirt, there still isn’t any reason to leave it there. They don’t need it, and it might as well be out in the tomato patch doing some good. All the worms need is shredded newspaper, they don’t need actual “Dirt” or “soil” to be happy and productive members of worm society.
Dare I suggest that the reason it’s there is because the previous owner didn’t feel like removing used bedding, that perhaps she just added fresh bedding on top, so what you’ve got there is a year’s worth of self-composted worm poo and newspaper? Go put it on the 'maters, it’s totally wasted there.
I bet you could sell it on eBay for a pretty packet, too.
The “pungent liquid” is just worm stickiness. It’s not toxic the way a toad will exude something nasty from its skin so the dog that just picked it up will spit it out. It’s easily washed off, I think it’s just worm mucus. Toddlers occasionally ingest fishin’ worms with no ill effects, except to Mom, who has to go lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead. “He ate a what??”
I would encourage you to let the Sprat learn how to pick up and handle worms. This will come in handy in later life, when sometimes it’s important to be able to pick up something ostensibly icky (worms, pillbugs) without flinching, with joy, even. Any number of Five-year-old kindergarten buddies will be blown away by this skill, for starters. Ditto for that cute college boy, as she cheerfully baits not only her own hook, but his too…
Potato skins are consumed faster than big chunks of potato, or eyes. My worms could polish off a batch of potato peelings in a single day, but large chunks of potato (or apple) mainly just sat there for a while. They eventually disappeared, but it took longer. I think bacterial decomposition had a lot to do with it, too, whereas with peelings, an hour or two after I spread them out, I could go down there and pull them aside and they’d be rife with snacking worms scurrying away. Loved them peelings.
I’ll take red wriggler worm composting over bacterial composting any day (or year). I’ve got a fancy black drum composter and the thing works like shit. My old system of just tossing red wrigglers into a large pile of whatever I threw in and letting them do their thing worked great.
Glad I can entertain you. I knew when I started it, it would either be amusing or sink like a stone. I’m happy other people are interested.
Duck Duck Goose, you’re awesome, thank you so much! I think I will go feed my 'maters in the morning - they’ve got some blossom end rot, so they need some eggshells anyway. I can mix crushed eggshells in with the worm castings (yes, that was a typo before) and do two jobs at once.
Any suggestions on how to get the worms out of the stuff (whatever it is) first? That’s where they’re all hanging out, see. Should I just move all the food to one end so they move over there? Or do I have to pick through the black stuff and pick them out one by one? (Not that it would be impossible; it’s not a very large box: 12"X9" with about 2" of black stuff in the bottom.)
Oh, I should probably get more newspapers first, if they’re going to move into the papers, eh?
Ya know, before this thread, I’d often thought of starting a compost pile but had decided it’s too much work. Now, I have a desire to get me some red wigglers (the cadillac of worms!) and start a combination compost pile/worm farm.
I have WhyNot and Duck Duck Goose to thank. Who knows. I might just make my fortune as red wiggler worm/compost king of southwest Georgia.
Nope, sorry… there’s already a King of Red Wrigglers on Hillcrest RD in Moultrie. Actually, I think it was a woman, so maybe she can be Queen to your King.
