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.