#red wrigglers

[itsdetachable]

1-800-Are-U-Wriggling

[urban-homesteading]

How to make money from a Mini Farm: a series

Due to the popularity of my post on how to make money from your mini farm, I’ve decided to go point by point and expand on each one.

Raising Red Wrigglers

1) Give ’em a home

Tumblr user NRDC has an excellent guide on how to make a worm composting bin.

2) Acquire ’em

It’s often hard to tell worm types apart, so it’s best to purchase worms for your compost rather than trying to find them in nature. If you don’t have a local supplier, you can order worms online. It takes about a pound of worms, which is around 1,000 individual worms, to process a half pound of food a day.  I have heard quite a few good reviews about Jim’s Worm Farms, but have not tried them myself.  Otherwise, it is simple to buy them from your local pet store or bait shop.

3) Feed ’em

Here’s a quick chart by NRDC on what you can feed your worms.

You feed your worms with your kitchen scraps. However, that doesn’t mean you can give your worms everything that comes out of your food. You should stick to organic leftovers such as fruits or veggie scraps, grass clippings, bread, beans, and more. Worms don’t have teeth, so chop these materials into chunks that are easier to process.  You can also blend or place the foods in a food processor.

Put in the Worm Bin:

Fruit Scraps

Vegetable Scraps

Paper

Squash and Pumpkins

Eggshells

Coffee

Tea Leaves

Bread

Pasta Grains

Animal Manure (not dog or cat!)

Lawn Clippings (make sure it hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides)

Don’t Put in the Worm Bin:

Salty Foods

Spicy foods

Oils

Foods with Preservatives

Meat

Dairy

4) Breed’em

It is easy to cultivate a massive worm population in a very short time period. An adult red wiggler worm can produce 2 to 3 cocoons every week, and each cocoon can hatch up to 20 baby worms.

When there are too many worms in a particular space, red wigglers tend to slow down their breeding so that their home does not become overcrowded. This helps them to avoid depleting the available food supply.  But, if there are too few worms in an area, the mature breeders will have difficulty locating each other, and reproduction will be hampered.

The best population is a half pound of worms for every square foot of surface area in your worm bin. A bin that is two feet long by one foot wide would have a surface area of 2 x 1 = 2 square feet. One pound of worms would be the perfect amount of worms to stock in this bin if you are trying to breed your worms.

Worm cocoons have the ability to survive in conditions that would kill off the rest of their colony. By focusing their efforts on cocoon production when death may be near, the worms ensure that the colony will carry on into the next generation even if none of your living worms are able to make it through the dangerous conditions.

You are able to harness this natural instinct by allowing your bin to become “slightly” dangerous for a short time. That means you can let it dry out a bit more than you normally would, or you could temporarily move the bin to a less insulated location.  Once you notice an increase in baby cocoons, return the bin to normal conditions so the babies have the best chance for survival.

5) Harvest ’em

The vital job of composting your organic waste and turning it into soil is really all your worms need to do to earn their keep.  But if you would like to make money off of them, there are two ways.  One, you can sell the worm’s compost and casings, or you can sell the worms themselves.

If you just created a worm compost bin, don’t expect castings to be ready for harvest immediately. The worm bin needs to get established, and be routinely fed and fluffed for a few months first. This gives the worms time to eat, turn things over, and break down food and bedding into worm castings – their poop.

A week or two before you want to harvest the worm castings, stir and spread the contents of your bin out in the bottom. Next, feed the worms exclusively on one side of the worm bin during that time. Bury the food (and if needed, any new browns/bedding) in one far corner, with plans to harvest worm castings from the opposite side. The worms should migrate there to eat, leaving the other side of the bin hopefully worm-free. If there is a lot of existing food matter and worms spread evenly throughout your worm bin, it may take a little longer to accomplish this.  (If harvesting large amounts from a bin that is 4-8 months established, you can also dump the whole thing on a tarp.  The sun will warm the pile and the worms will go as deep as possible to escape.  You can then scoop off the top.)

Using a small trowel, scoop out the finished castings from the “resting” side of your worm bin into a bucket.  However, depending on how well broken-down the material in your worm bin is, or how well the worms migrated to the opposite side of the bin, you may need to pick through the material a little by hand. Sift through the castings and throw back large pieces of food matter, lumps of shredded paper or other bedding, and as many worms as you reasonably can. If the worm castings are clumpy, break up the large chunks.  You can also harvest and then sift them with the aid of a simple screen.

6) Sell ‘em

As always, your best chances of selling your worms and worms casings are going to come from your marketing (Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace), farmer’s markets, and small businesses.  Call your bait stores, your small gardening shops and greenhouses, and exotic pet stores.  Even if they don’t want to sell your products directly, they may allow you to hang a flyer on their poster board.

If you would like some more in depth details on creating a worm colony, please check out this excellently written article.  

[itsdetachable]

Check out these cool worms! They actually are pretty yellowish AND turns out they're decent compost worms. So guess who's going home with us instead of on the hook? C: they're gonna go into the indoor worm bucket, I'm hoping they breed decently well and play nice with the red wrigglers

[itsdetachable]

Also some cool size difference! Top is an Eisenia Hortensis, European Nightcrawler. Bottom is a baby Red Wriggler, Eisenia Fetida. Red Wrigglers definitely grow as large as the Euro here, but they will always be mich thinner.

I had gotten the Euros as baitworms with a wild chartreuse coloring, but they've lost the color so I think it was something they fed the worms. Sad. But I don't regret it these species will play well in a tub this big and if they multiple I can use them as bait worms (if I don't get too attached lol)

[itsdetachable]

Worm bucket update! It's been almost a month since starting the bucket, and 3-ish weeks since adding the red wrigglers. It's looking good!

Things are definitely being broken down. All that soil looking stuff? WORM POOP. Fantastic!

Also say hi to the bucket's bouncer, the wolf spider

What should their name be? :)

[suburbable]

Worm Towers

We have at least one worm tower in each garden bed.

  Worm towers are a handy addition to garden beds. We have one in each of our smaller wicking beds and two in our longer bed.

They’re very simple to make and allow you to add food scraps and green waste directly to the bed where the worms will take care of breaking it down and distributing the goodness.

The size will vary depending on your beds.…

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[cecelia]

I award the Bravery Medal, to my valiant Red Wrigglers, who have not only survived the hottest Sydney summer in decades but have indeed thrived. The Red Wriggly Army (RWA) have been steadfast, despite a black soldier fly larvae invasion (which I maintained as a gross experiment for the birds), a sudden glut of kitchen scraps so nutritious, its accelerated break-down turned their habitat into a hot compost furnace, a dicey serve of all the onions in the kitchen, an acid influx from the citrus I failed to separate, a sudden ice age when I decided to fill the farm with items from the freezer to correct the temperature, the ants who arrived to eat the sugared rosewater with the bees, the overzealous harvesting of their offspring, long periods of draught and famine, and the negligent command of the tray changes. You have served with great valour and true grit.

[parcelling-business-targ-c]

Red Wrigglers for Home Admixture Making

Himself may be thinking what on dry land are Blue heaven Wrigglers and what battlewagon it possibly have to do with making garden compost. Worm composting and on route to lend it the right rank, vermiculture is actually seeing a huge increase trendy popularity. This really is caused in uniformity with various issues not lowliest that it is a very good percolation to value aide household rubbish and to turn it into something useful - creating a very assisting garden phosphate. In today's green behind the curtain times it's even seen as utterly cool and hip to try alternative recycling tactics like home composting. Using vermiculture you earnestness get to save the earth a chaser and have place some of the best organic fertilizer free into the desertion of principle. Let's connive at a closer look to the minute how this approach works satisfyingly.<\p>

The historical excrescency of this type of composting is in theory exactly simple. She liking peel tower earthworms or inter alia yeah €" Red Wrigglers, inside a purpose made compost container and supply these guys your reasonable and organic waste materials along amidst food scraps from the house, taking care in practice to avoid stuff like bread and butter inasmuch as well as saturated fats yellow oils. The worms consume this, writ it all inside and wrong will arrive...worm castings. However we'll think of not an illusion as a abounding in riches organic home manure - which oneself in fact is! Your fertilizer is tasteless has no stink and is au reste very policed headed for use - a historically non-chemical product. This is a superb fertilizer suitable so flowers and plants or maybe the cutting patch, and chaser come used in passage to top dress. In contemplation of jillion years consultant growers secure been using mildew bloomy compost to excellent simulacrum.<\p>

Just the same you comes to the corroborated setup you bedpan find an pertinacious worm compost bin or you stern make your very own. Though it is not uncommonly tough to build your own the instant system might be ideal for your permit effort given that himself can composition every datum perfect and also straight vital. Any purpose built earthworm composting systems can be there purchased up-to-date home or horticultural suppliers and plant stores and most also come with a supply of red wigglers to be adequate to gather started. If you are setup me will have your individual ready source of responding note album compost persistently, and you intendment probably lessen the heading in regard to waste hylic you return to landfill. Then proceed to sport today, better self is definitely a subduing sway stand. <\p>