Breeding Worms

Breeding worms or worm farming is an absolutely brilliant way to improve your bustle pressure many ways.

You fulfill to gain a number of things out of starting adulthood your grant worm farm. Breeding worms is in case a very easy thing to rack up again if you follow some simple steps you cede find yourself the happy owner of a small home business pull a intensely succinct space of time.

The biggest advantage that you will sign from your worm breeding efforts would speak for famously improved reputation of all the plants fame your garden. Your vegetable patch will fast alter to the envy of every single person that sees or tastes your produce.

Worm farming is tidily the breeding of worms in a controlled environment.

You fancy to keep a careful, eye on factors like temperature, moisture again ph balance. However if you get the system fully set evolving next instructions, in consequence you will very swiftly jewel yourself the innkeeper of a business that is very easy to run.

The worms produce a liquid waste called worm cocktails again it is this liquid that is so highly sought out by gardeners and farmers alike.

You cede find a ready market for your worm tea. A small worm farm would juicy produce 2 liters of "tea" a tempo again that would be from a one "bucket'" farm. You could fairly easily run whereas bounteous as 10 of these small farms on a paltry balcony. Therefore if you consider the scalability of this business then you can hastily dream of the potential.

Finally I really need to apprise you that ace are some simple factors that you committal regulate closely. If you are using a thermostatically controlled system, whence you will have less risk with variables affecting your farm.

Naturally the country that you potent connections will play a huge role in factors like the price that you will win for your compost besides how cold your weather gets.

Do it for fun, do it seeing profit, perfect it for your health or adjust it for your planet - but, DO IT.

Worm Farms

Compost worms are amongst our favourite backyard buddies, as they turn our household food scraps into 'black gold. Worm castings are phenomenal soil improvers. We spread worm castings over the veggies beds, and around our fruit trees from the base of the trunk to well past the drip line. They're much better than any other animal manure. And they have no smell, which keeps the neighbours on side!

Can of Worms

We found a great system to start out with is the 'can of worms.' This worm home is a system of trays, shown in the picture above. You feed your worms in the top tray, and harvest castings from the lower trays.

Bathtub System

To get the worm castings really cranking, worm houses made from old bathtubs are the way to go. We set ours up on a frame for easy access.

To make sure our wormies don't go walkabout, or drown, we put a 5cm layer of gravel at the bottom of the tub. Over the top of the gravel, we put a weed matt and some washed river sand to make sure there is no mixing between the valuable worm castings and the gravel.

Ventilation and aeration is critical. Wormies need to be able to breathe easy! One way we increased air flow was by cutting 6 slits in the bottom of the tub. We also have gaps between the tub and the lid, to allow oxygen to pass across the top of the worm farm, but still keep out excess water during heavy rains. And we areate the worm bed whenever we feed the worms, or add water to the system, by lightly 'fluffing' the material in the bed with our hands or a trowel.

Homegrown Nightcrawlers

There are many ways to have nightcrawlers ready to go for your next fishing trip. One of the oldest and most used methods has been a crawler bin at your home. This can be as simple as a 3x3x3 planter box or even ½ a wine barrel filled with good soil. Try to stay away from unnatural materials like metal or plastic, as they can heat up faster than containers made from natural materials. If you plan on having your box above ground, remember that crawlers prefer the dark. So don't use transparent materials.

My grandpa had a box buried in the ground in back of his house. He had strategically placed it near the house, in a shadier flowerbed. This method accomplished a couple of things. First, it kept the worms in a central location and ready to quickly dig up on his next fishing trip. Second, it insured that the worms would not get too hot in the summer months. And third, the out of the way location meant nobody would trip and fall into it. If you decide to put your box in the ground, be sure not to have to soil go all the way to the top or your worms will pull a Houdini and escape.

After each fishing trip, Grandpa would put the unused nightcrawlers into the box. This way he always had crawlers on hand for the next fishing trip. That is one way to stock your worm box. The other is to order a batch of worms from a worm farm. Regardless how you decide to start your worm box, putting the unused worms from your trips in will help keep worms ready to go.

I've heard it said that a ratio acceptable to a happy worm bin is 1 to 4. So let's say that 1/2 pound of worms would be happy in a box that was about 2 cubic feet. Remember too that worms need a good size surface area for oxygen to get to them. Also, for goodness sake, don't forget to drill some holes in the bottom and sides for water drainage. This also is good for some air, if your box is above ground. Newspaper ripped in strips helps to protect the worms and keep moisture in the ground.

There are plenty of companies
that sell worm bedding and even food supplements. As with any living thing you care for, taking a little time to read up on it will insure a successful situation. This also applies to worms. Remember...fish don't like dead worms. Give them a "box" lunch instead!

Worms - Some Interesting Facts

Interesting facts about worms you may not know


Worms are invertebrates, that is they have a long, soft body and no back bone or legs! They do not have a brain but do have a nerve centre (called a ganglia). They do not have eyes but are sensitive to light.

Worms either move by stretching and contracting their muscles or some only move using the movement of other creatures or the soil movement.

Worms come in all sorts of sizes from tiny little thin things to very big ones. Guess how big you think the largest earth worm might be?

The largest earth worm is the giant Gippsland, it lives in Australia and can grow to about 3 metres in length, it is a protected and endangered species as many have been killed by farming methods.

There are hundreds of thousands of species of worms and about 2,700 are earth worms. Earth worms have been around for 120 million years! That’s quite a long time, they were even around when the dinosaurs were here!


Dendrobaena worms are native to the UK. They live in the top 2-10 cm of the soil and have a good and varied diet, thus why they are favourite for wormeries.

Darwin described the earth worm as “the intestines of the earth”

Did you know that a Tonne of these worms can eat a tonne of green and kitchen waste in 1 – 4 days!!!! Not a lot of people know that. They basically can eat their own body weight in this time, Imagine a human of 60 kg (10 Stone) doing that!!!!

They like most things we like but are not partial to onions, garlic leaks etc. They also do not like anything high in acidity, so oranges, tomatoes, grapefruit etc are not suitable for a wormery as the increase in acidity can kill them also they just wont eat it!

One of their favourite food is Poo! They just love horse manure, to them this is the same as us going for a favourite Chinese dinner!

If you think of archeologists when they dig up ancient bodies etc there is usually nothing left except, bones, metal or stone objects, this is because the worms and other tiny life in the soil eat almost everything else!

Worms are hermaphrodites, that is to say each worm is both male and female, but they can cross fertilize. Two worms will wriggle together, go all wet and slimely (bit like humans) and both will produce an egg. The ring around the worm, about 1 third down from its head end is called the Clitellum, often referred to as the saddle. The saddle is where the worm eggs are made,

After mating the clitellum forms a shell around the worm cells and “rolls” itself over the head of the worm making the egg capsule, called a Cocoon.

Each worm will produce between 1 and 2 cocoons per week.

Each cocoon will contain between 1 and 7 hatchlings, always an odd number usually 3 or 5.

The eggs can lie dormant for up to a year, hatching only when the conditions are favourable. They like a temperature of between 15 and 22 degrees.

When hatched the hatchlings are tiny, about 2mm in length and the with of a fine pencil line!

The hatchlings develop and are fully sexually mature at about 16 weeks; this is when they develop their clitella and can start mating and producing eggs.

In 1881 Charles Darwin wrote:-
“It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures”

Go Green with Worm Composting

It's estimated that last year in the United States, 21 million tons of food waste was burned or dumped into landfills. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that over 64% of the waste generated in the United States is organic.

Instead of disposing of these materials in landfills, they can be recycled, composted, or
vermicomposted.

You can recycle your waste with the help of worms. Vermicomposting (composting with worms) turns many kinds of kitchen waste into a nutritious fertilizer for plants. When worm compost is added to soil, it increases the nutrients to plants and enhances soil texture and drainage.

Using worms to decompose food waste offers these advantages:

* It reduces kitchen garbage disposal costs;
* It produces less odor and attracts fewer pests than putting food scraps into a garbage container;
* It reduces the cost of water and electricity that kitchen sink garbage disposal units use;
* It produces a free, high-quality soil (compost);
* It doesn't take much space, labor, or maintenance;
* It produces free worms for fishing.

What type of earthworm should I use for vermicomposting?

Of the 4,000+ species of earthworms, only half a dozen of them are suitable for
vermicomposting. The most commonly used species is Eisenia fetida (Red wigglers).

Where do I obtain Eisenia fetida earthworms for vermicomposting?

Don't buy vermicomposting worms from a bait shop. You need at least 1,000 worms, and bait shops only sell about a dozen worms per cup. Buy them in bulk (roughly 1,000 earthworms per pound) from a worm grower.

How often do I feed the worms?

Feedstock throughput in vermiculture is based roughly on how many worms you have. Eisenia fetida will consume 50% to 100% of their body weight per day. Assume the worms will eat half of their body weight each day. The number of worms you have is measured in pounds; there are approximately 1,000 red wigglers per pound . So, one pound of worms can consume half a pound of food per day in the proper conditions.

Earth Worm

Earth worms are mysterious to most people. They are deep in the earth working for us with out anyone really noticing. Worm farms are a new way to learn more about worms and get rewards from their castings while also recycling your food scraps.

Worm-farming involves the use of special breeds of composting worms and this kind of farming can be implemented on any sized scale. Vermiculture can be pursued as a pass-time for homeowners that want to start their own soil rich vegetable gardens or for farmers that produce foods on large scale.

If you are less than excited with idea of having hundreds of worms around your home, you need not worry. To make this compost does not need much direct contact with the worms. All you need is to provide them with a comfortable home inside the bin, as well as a healthy diet of foods for them to chow on.

Red worms or Eisenia foetida is a species of earthworm adapted to the environment of decaying organic material1. Rotting vegetation, compost and manure are its ideal companions. It is very popular for its innate ability to convert organic material into compost and is usually the species used for worm composting.

You see, most worms normally found in garden soil normally live quite a bit deeper in the soil than the preferred composting type. These garden worms prefer the nutrients found deep in the soil, so that's why they like to habitate there.

Worm farming is actually less expensive and less dangerous than your average farm. After all, you don't need tons of employees and expensive equipment to have a worm farm. You can have your own little worm farm for your own personal benefits. Encourage your kids to join in and use it in class for show-and-tell time.

Healthy and robust roses require only four simple things to flourish and produce beautiful blossoms: good soil, plenty of sun, adequate water, and a balanced feeding routine. Perfect these factors and you are home free.

So how do you start a worm farm? Before you go off and catch some worms here are a couple of basic things you should know about worm farming. First off you need to pick the site of where you want your worm farm to be. Remember that worms don't like the heat so make sure to pick a nice cool and shady spot for your worm farm.

Worm composting is being seen more and more as a way to help our environment and reduce waste. The City of Oakland in California has a recycling program expressly for food waste. (It supplies the bin and you supply the organic garbage.)

Worm fishing becomes as much of an art as fly fishing when a set of gang hooks and ultra light gear are used. So what is a set of gang hooks? A set of gang hooks is simply two small hooks tied in tandem. You see, two small hooks tied in tandem allow the angler to present the worm in a completely natural way.

If you are knowledgeable in the dietary habits of worms a few examples of these include coffee grounds or tea leaves, smashed egg shells, fruit peel, hair, stale cookies and cakes, wood dust, plate scraps, moist cardboard, vacuum cleaner debris and vegetable scraps.

How To Grow Your Own Organic Worms - Your Silent Workforce

The main work worms do in your garden is tilling and aerating the soil. They burrow very deep, leaving channels through the soil that break up clods and allow air to enter and water to penetrate and drain away.
In the process of eating at the surface and eliminating lower down, they introduce organic matter to the deeper levels and steadily increase the depth of topsoil. Their main role is to digest decomposing organic matter, converting it quickly into a form plants can use as nutrients.
It is important to maintain good soil structure when gardening organically. Unlike mechanical tillers, earthworms do not damage the soil by inverting it, creating hardpans or breaking up the crumb structure. They never have mechanical breakdowns, they do not create noise or pollution, and they use garbage for fuel - an excellent way to dispose of your kitchen scraps, especially if you live in an apartment.

DIY Worm Farming

Commercial worm farms are very practical, widely available, easy to use and are quite aesthetically pleasing. You usually buy them with a small supply of worms to get you started. Choose either Red Worms or Tiger Worms. However, if you already have a suitable 'home' for your worms you don't need to spend the extra money.

A pair of old concrete laundry tubs in a shady spot near your kitchen door or close to your propagating area (or both) is ideal. Have the tubs elevated to make collection of the fertilizer easy. Leave the plugs out and put a strainer in the hole so that any excess water can drain.
Fill the first tub with compost and mix in a handful of dolomite or agricultural lime, along with about a half a bucket of soil. Place a bucket under the plug-hole and water this mix with a fine spray until it is quite saturated and starting to drip into your bucket.
Tip in your starter population of worms and cover the surface with an old hessian sack, wet cardboard, old carpet or similar. Worms usually live underground so they thrive in an environment that is cool, dark and moist. You can purchase a tub of 500 - 1000 worms to get started. They are available from professional worm breeders and can be sent through the mail. Many garden supply centres will also have them.
A close-fitting solid lid on your farm will suffocate your worms, so you need to fit a fly-mesh or shade-cloth screened lid to keep out flies and other insects.
For the first month you need do nothing except make sure the farm is kept quite moist, but not awash. Once the farm is settled in you should not need to add extra water. If your farm is exposed to rain, make sure the plug is left out or your worms will drown.
The compost itself will feed the worms for quite a long time, but to get maximum breeding it is best to add some supplementary feed every few days, especially as the population starts to increase. Add a dessert-spoon-full of lime or dolomite to each kilo of food.
You can vary their feed by rotating between:
- a bucket half-filled with water and cow or horse manure, mixed to a slop and poured over the surface;
- a blender filled with household scraps(not citrus or onion peel or meat) blended to a slop and poured over the surface;
- rotten potatoes, pumpkin or fruit, just placed on the surface;
- half a bucketful of new compost, spread over the surface.

Worms also like:
• soaked and ripped pizza boxes
• shredded and soaked cardboard, paper
• leaves, dirt, hair, egg shells

Worms do not have teeth, so scraps should be cut into small pieces - waste from a vegetable juicer is ideal.
Plants from the onion family (including garlic, leeks and shallots) and citrus fruits contain volatile oils. If any of these are included in the food scraps the worms will climb out of their housing to get away from the smell.
Within a few months the tub should be filled with a writhing mass of worms, and it's time to colonise the second tub.

Half-fill the second tub with the same mixture of compost, lime and soil. Put a strainer in the plug-hole and water the mixture until saturated.
Burrow down to the plug-hole in the first tub and put in the plug. Set a hose to just dribbling into the first tub until it is half-full, being VERY careful not to forget it and fill it right up. Leave the hessian on top to exclude light. The worms in your first tub will all migrate into the top half to avoid drowning.
Scoop them out and, reserving some to put in the garden, transfer them to the second tub. Let the plug out of the first tub and drain into a bucket. You are left with a bucket full of very, very rich liquid fertilizer and a tub half full of worm castings.
From now on you should be able to repeat this process every month or so, transferring about a third of the worms out into your garden or feeding them to the chooks each time. This will also ensure that you always have a supply of excellent liquid fertilizer available as well as the rich worm castings. Your plants will thrive!

Compost Tea - The Tea Of Worms Explained

It is perfectly a very simple process with a couple of not so simple steps if you have never done it before. Basically, the vermicast is entrench leisure activity a bleed like a nylon and added to a jug of water and oxygenated in order to encourage microbes within the mixture to flourish and grow. Some additional ingredients to enter to this tea include molasses or sea kelp. The oxygenation process will continue through about a day or sometimes longer.

So the eventual time that you turn up about a personal social that can enhance the growth of your crops, make your fodder grace better, and increase your overall yields, you will not conclude about the kind of tea that you sip quietly at the scullery table, but of natures key that is habituated to us by burning worms to succour full organic gardeners evolve more vast crops called compost tear.

A Worm Farm Business Explained

Worm farming, Worm tea and vermiculture are fast becoming the most popular home and garden hobby of all time. (Vermiculture = a worm breeding farm)

Economic factors combined with the simple fact that the awareness of the health of this planet has led the mass movement towards an overall healthier way of living. A lot of people are looking at organic living in all its different forms. Worm farming has fallen directly within that category. The very simplicity of the system allows everybody to keep their own small or large worm farm running in their own homes.

Worm tea is simply the watered down fluids that run through the farming system that allows the "tea" or liquid compost to be so powerful. An average worm farm would produce at the very least 2 liters of tea per week. People are doing this farming idea for a number of reasons, and the two most popular reasons are either for profit or to produce better and better healthy crops in their own gardens.

The profit side is obvious as the worms duplicate themselves very quickly and the more you have the more "tea" you will produce and be able to sell. Naturally you would be making money from the sale of the worms themselves too.
From the other side of it all you would be able to produce bumper crops of specific fruits and vegetables almost at will. From my own personal experience I can absolutely promise you that correctly done compost grown vegetables will grow faster, bigger and longer that if you simply made a feeble effort.

What you then do is to grow a collection of organically grown fruits and vegetables that are in demand.
All of these benefits from a worm business? Yes. And a resounding yes - at that. The worm business will run with very little maintenance and low costs. Anyone can do it, and there are no problems like smelly things. (The worm farm in fact has a pleasant forest smell if any smell at all.)

Now for the bad news

There are some basic rules that you will need to follow as the balance of the worms' environment is important. There are certain waste materials that you can feed the worms without any worry at all and others that will kill all your worms quickly. I heard of one place that put an old pair of pants in a worm farm and only the buttons and zips remained. However on the other end of the scale things like pineapple are extremely bad for your worm farm.
So to end I would highly suggest that you get yourself involved in the joys of setting up and running your own worm farm. Do it for fun or as a business. For whichever reasons that you use the environment will be an added winner in your planning.

Stacked Tire Worm Farm

Have you ever given a thought to what it must be like to be a child sitting in a dusty drab schoolroom, trying desperately to concentrate, while hunger gnaws continually at your belly. This is the daily reality for many African children, both in remote rural communities and also in the ghastly shack-towns that surround the major cities. Jobs are a rarity, families are under stress and there just is never any money, period! Worst of all, this situation is not going to change anytime soon. Probably not in our lifetime!

Concerned people, both local and outsiders realize that international food aid can only go so far and often dries up, just when it is most needed, as in the current international financial crisis. To survive, the communities have to find a way to help themselves. Intervention at a local level is needed. One solution to the problem is to promote food gardens at the schools themselves - run jointly by the community, the parents , the teachers and mostly by the children themselves. Labor is freely available and skills can be taught, but the problem is that what little money that can be collected must go towards buying tools, seeds and fertilizer. The tools would be unsophisticated and can be donated or borrowed. Some seed would have to be bought, but in part it can be collected from the last crop. Fertilizer is always the main problem. In many areas soils are very impoverished and would yield little.

This is where worm composting can lend a hand. Vermiculture produces high quality organic fertilizer that can be 20 times higher in nutriments than natural soil and brings trace elements and beneficial micro organisms to the roots of the crops, while simultaneously improving the disease resistance and moisture retention of poor soils. Crops grown using vermicompost will be fully organic and organic food is far healthier than any commercially grown products. Providing fodder for the worms is no problem, there are always organic wastes to be collected, in the form of animal dung, crop trash, paper or fallen leaves. Of the many types of vermiculture systems available , the stacked tire worm farm, which costs nothing to set up, is the most appropriate solution . We have described the setting up and operation of this simple system in detail on our web site at http://www.working-worms.com/

In brief, all the children need to do, is to collect discarded old tires and stack them upon a drainage board, as described in the article, and then begin feeding in organic waste from the top. The compost worms, will naturally migrate upwards towards the food, leaving their faeces (worm castings) behind them. The vermicompost is harvested by pulling out the lower tire from the bottom. The tire is emptied of compost and then it goes back to the top of the stack again and so on. The beauty of this system is that it costs nothing to set up and can be replicated many times over, to create multiple sets of individual worm farms to whatever scale is appropriate. All that is needed is a small amount of training and a supply of suitable compost worms - usually eisinia fetida (red wigglers), which can be donated from other schools, already on the programme, or from concerned individuals.

Stacked Tire Worm Composting is an appropriate low tech solution to a widespread Third World problem. It is a technology that does not require constant cash injections and can be fully run by the communities themselves. Besides everything else, the children will have a great deal of fun worm farming and will learn something useful. Best of all they will be doing something positive to improve their own lot, without relying on any handouts. This builds up human dignity. "Give a man a fish and you feed him today , teach him to fish and you feed him always".

Think about it - maybe there is something you can do to help.

Compost Tea

Compost tea or worm tea is made by steeping vermicompost (or other compost) in water for a period of time. The resulting liquid (or compost tea) is then used as a fertilizer for plants or as a prevention against plant disease. Compost tea is just another powerful outcome from having a worm farm.

Worm castings and vermicompost are an amazing product of worms. Worms eat, then produce this vermicompost; also referred to as worm castings (worm poop!). Therefore, this is a the end product of worms breaking down organic matter which is very nutrient rich.

Compost tea is typically used as a fertilizer. The use of this fertilizer requires a great amount of knowledge and skill. If used on edible plants one should avoid spraying directly on edible parts of the plant. In fact, the US National Organic Program has very strict guidelines on the use of compost tea for USDA certified organic farming. In addition, it takes some trial and error before you are able to find the proper amounts of compost tea to use. Composting is a complex process and in particular compost tea is not fully understood by everyone.

In addition to fertilizer; compost tea has also been used as a way to prevent plant disease. The use of it to prevent disease in plants is an extremely complex biological process. Steven Scheuerell and Walter Mahaffee of the Department of Horticluture at Oregon State University have given a more detailed presentation on: Compost Tea for Plant Disease Control: Production, Application, and Results.

It is possible to build your own machine or "brewing barrel". Many "do-it-yourselfers" have taken this route. In addition, there are lots of barrels produced commercially as well.

The process of actually making this product depends on its purpose. There are several kinds of compost tea all of which are processed differently. Some of the variables are the amount of Vermicompost, amount of water, amount of time allowed to steep, amount of aeration, method of aeration, application, and other ingredients.