The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out... OR: My new pets!

Well, I’ll just have to build a vast red wiggler worm farm/compost pile and crush her! I’ll buy up acres and acres of farmland. Lee County, GA shall be known as the red wiggler worm farm/compost capital of the world!

This thing could make me mad with power. :smiley:

So when do we get to see the cute wormmeh pictures?

Are these the same worms that got featured as the “under desk compost” pile kinda things?

How to safely remove worms from bedding:

Spread it all out evenly in the box, like cake batter in a pan. Remove any loose uneaten food on the top–you want to have a solid layer of just worms ‘n’ bedding. Now, if you see large obvious pieces of undigested newspaper minus any worms, pull that out too, and set it aside carefully (it may have eggs or baby worms sticking to it.) And if you see any large obvious worms, grab them, too, and put them somewhere safe. Note: they WILL travel, and fast, too. When I would put them in the turtle’s food dish, it was a race whether the turtle could catch them before they hightailed it out of the dish and across his cage. Generally while he was very, very slowly pursuing one of them, I’d be standing there patiently catching and replacing the other two or three, over and over again, until he signified he was full by ignoring the rest.

So they need to be in something with a tight-fitting lid. A cottage cheese container with a few holes punched in the lid works fine. Put a small handful of bedding in there for them to hide in, otherwise when you take the lid off, they’ll all be stuck frantically to the underside of the lid and all over the inside surface of the cottage cheese tub, necessitating about 10 minutes of frustrating scraping, because they’re sticky, see, but you don’t want to hurt them… It’s the devil to get 'em off there. If you give them a bit of bedding, you can just upend the tub into the worm farm, because they’ll all be sheltering in that.

Anyway, so now you’ve got a solid cake batter layer of bedding with invisible worms in it. Now you divide the cake batter into nine little (9) piles, three by three. Think tic tac toe pattern. Have good separation between the piles. You want nine little volcanoes, with bare ground/plastic in between them.

Then you pick up each pile, individually, and you sift it through your fingers, and you pull out all the worms. When you can’t find any more, you put the pile back down in its spot, and you pick up and search another pile.

The reason for all this is that the worms won’t leave their pile and cross open, bare ground to go to another pile. This way you know that you’ve definitely searched each pile. Otherwise, if you just rummage at random through the entire mass of bedding, the worms move around, dammit, and you can’t get anywhere near to catching all of them. But confine them in piles, and you have a reasonable chance of getting the majority of them out.

And if a few do end up in the tomato patch, it’s not a crisis.

Then you put the worms back in their worm farm with their fresh bedding, the old-but-still-usable bedding you salvaged that probably has eggs and baby worms in it, and a modicum of food, and not forgetting to add the worms in the cottage cheese container.


Hadda google Kelly Slocum. Still not sure who she is, as she apparently doesn’t have a Wiki page, but no, I’m not her.

Yup.

Forgot to say that for the squeamish, who hesitate to pick up a handful of wormy worm bedding that they know is gonna be chockful of worms, there is an alternate technique: you remove layers of each little volcano. You start at the pointy top of the volcano and you remove the top 1 inch of bedding. Then a minute later, you remove the next inch of bedding. You work your way down, and the thing is, the worms flee your advance, since you’re taking away their cover. They’ll burrow deeper to get away from your disturbance.

Then by the time you get down to the last inch layer, you’ve got a solid layer of basically just worms, with a little bedding, desperately writhing to get away, but they can’t go anywhere, because it’s bare ground all around.

Which itself is not a sight for the squeamish.

I always just picked up the pile and rummaged.

Now I want a worm farm just so I can divide and dig out worms! :smiley:

I have no need for worms, but I want a worm farm!

I like worms. The idea of picking up a handful of them is awesome! Am I weird?