Worm Farmin'

If you want it for your garden you really want a raised device that allows you to catch the liquid. That's just the really good nutrients. Otherwise in say a bed in the ground it all just goes into the ground and the bottom of your worm garden is just super fertile.

If you had a raised garden bed, I'm not sure why you couldn't just farm worms there also. Leave a spot for your food scraps say in the middle and your garden around it.

Once upon a time as an enterprising youth I raised thousands of red worms for fishing and vermicomposting.

I will tell you how my Pops and I did it. First, you can buy worms and/or eggs to start. There are people who sell them. You don't have to, though, if you have a spot of ground near your garden that you can set aside for drawing them in. We had a pile of gin trash, or mote cotton that we let break down by keeping it damp and adding compostables. It didn't take long before we had a good stock of worms and eggs in that pile.

We built our beds out of heavy pallets and plywood. They were about 16ish inches deep by two foot wide by six foot or so long. Our bedding was a mix of the gin trash, peat moss, and garden soil. We kept a layer of newspaper and/or corrugated cardboard on top to both hold moisture and discourage crawling. Worms can eat any un-dyed paper, no color of any kind should be used. The black ink from newspaper was never a problem. We fed all of our kitchen waste to the worms.

In addition to the worms we raised rabbits. The rabbit litter was the key to our worm raising. When we cleaned up that litter a large portion of it went on the worm beds. By the time we had things figured out we were raising red worms (actual red worms, not night crawlers or the like) that were 10-12" long. They're still the longest, best-looking red worms I've seen.

We sold worms for bait to a eight or ten stores, sold the castings for gardening (what we didn't use), and sold eggs, as well. The most labor-intensive part of the whole operation was turning the beds ever so often.

Research what type approach is best for your needs, and the best advice I can give is to keep it simple. I've watched people overcomplicate the process and waste a lot of time and money. Worms do crawl, and they will leave your bed if conditions are right for crawling (damp, humid night). Every bed our ours had a hinged top on it made of window screen (it also kept raccoons and such out of the beds), and each bed had a light that stayed on during those nights that were best for crawling. The light discourages them from crawling.

It was fun and interesting, and it was good money for a teenage kid. We raised rabbits for 15 or so years and worms form 10 or so.

Raise a few for composting in a small bin. Have used old chest freezers in the past as well . When I was younger I raised some to sell. Ants can destroy them so I always put the legs in coffee cans with a little vegetable oil in them.

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use plastic storage containers for my worm bins. Drill holes around the top and around the bottom. I've got 8. 1 for each day of the week plus an overflow. These work great for me. I get a lot of castings. I agree with catching the liquid if you can make it work.

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What are the holes in the bottom for?

How do you collect castings?

What does the liquid do?

Great info, thanks!!!

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Lazy peoples - worm tea

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Leachate is not worm tea or a poor person's substitute. shite is normally loaded in anaerobic bacteria not good for healthy worm or plant growth. You could theoretically oxygenate it with an aquarium pump, but it's some real diminishing returns if you're brewing teas. I'd never add good stuff to brew into a solution I expected was ever anaerobic.

The holes in the bottom are for drainage. You want moist bedding but not soaking wet. The biggest mistake I made when starting out was overfeeding. It creates way too much heat and moisture. If you want to catch the drainage which is great compost tea put a basin of some sort under the bin. You have to have that drainage in my experience.

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You can make a sifter with a wood frame and screen of some sort on the bottom.

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That's what we did, and we weighed our worms because counting would take forever. Only the largest went in the boxes. Sometimes we sifted over a wheelbarrow to catch the casting/eggs/smaller worms. All that would go back into a "new" bed and the process was started over.

We sometimes sifted eggs if we had someone who wanted them. If we were packing worms we would also turn the beds at the same time. We would turn a bed into an empty bed, and just run down the line of beds that way.