Part 2 Vermiculture

Feeding your worms,
  You will want to make sure your worms have enough food to keep their energy up and be able to make all those great worm castings (worm poop). This is the great rich fertilizer your working to get.  You will notice it won't take long before your worms have made alot of baby worms. They just love to eat, sleep and multiply! So about a month or two down the line you will need to set up another bin system for your new worms. So in this blog I will be explaining 3 new steps about worm care.  First step is Eating! Below is a list of food scraps best used to keep your pet worms healthy and happy!


~Dinner Time~
  One thing you may be wondering is the food schedule. Well this was one thing I was worried about, until a dear friend told me it's very simple you put a layer of food down and when its gone you feed them again. That's easy enough and before long you will have an idea of their feeding schedule. So next question I had was, What do you feed them? My friend chuckled a little bit and told me almost everything. But you will want to stay away from some foods. So here's the list,

~Foods they will Eat~                   

Grass Clippings             
Green Vegtable Scraps                             
Paper Strips (paper shredders work great)  
Wheat flour & Corn Meal       
Manure & coffee grounds             
Meats in Moderation   

  ~Foods to Avoid~

Oily Foods / Spicy / Acidic foods 
Super Salty foods (just think what salt does to a slug!)
High Citrus Fruits ~ No Pineapple!
Any kind of seeds ~ you don't want a garden in your bins
                              
   So above is basic foods you will be using and now a bit on storage of your food. This is a great way to make alot of food and keep it on hand for future use. Ok so what you need to do is take your garden plants cut or tear them up and put them in a freezer bag. As you collect your plants you can toss them in the freezer and when your ready to make up the mixture there ready for you. This is also applied to your kitchen scraps toss them in a bag, put them in the fridge and for a week fill the bag up, then again toss them into the freezer like your garden plants.
  Now your ready to make up your mixture of food. First thing is go to the pet store or feed store and pick up a bag of Calcuim Carbonate. (Be sure that the ingredients are all natural and there are no names of ingredients you don't recognize. Ingredients like magnesum are fine as they are natural minerals.)  Also while your there pick up a 10 lb. bag of peatmoss. This is for the bedding. And if you don't already have corn meal or wheat flour at home you should stop by the market and grab a bag of each. So you have all your plants in the freezer and your ingredients from the store, so lets get started!

~Food Mixture~
1.) Take plants from freezer and break or cut them up smaller
2.) You can use an old blender and chop them up into a mush
     ( You should end up with around 4 cups of plant mush.)
3.) Add about a cup of Cormeal or Wheat flour & a cup of Calcium C.    ( If your mixture is still very watery you should add more cornmeal till you make up a porage type of meal.)
4.) Your worms will love it if you add in some meat scraps blended of course
5.) Now you can put this mixture in a sealed container which can be kept in the bottom shelf of the fridge. Don't worry it will keep well and for awhile.

* A great idea my friend told me was to talk to the produce manager in your local stores to see if you can take their wilted produce off their hands, even pay a small fee. It may be hard to get fresh plants in the winter to use for food. Also see if they have any outdated foods like the corn meal or flour.
  Now your ready to feed your little buggers! Take your fingers and make a little trench for your food. Don't worry the worms will move out of the way. Then spoon in your food mixture and watch them come up and feed! The calcium carbonate will help them grow big and healthy.
  Next you notice as the weeks go by that your brown soil is turning into a deep rich jetblack colored soil. This is Black Gold! Now how do you harvest it you ask? It's really quite easy. So what you do is scrape off the top layer with your hands. About 2 inches and don't worry about your worms they will move down and out of the way. This is where you will be putting your rich soil in another bin. Keep it in here for a month and keep it watered with your spray bottle. The reason being is that in this rich soil is where your worms have laid their eggs. Yep they eat, poop and multiply all on the top layer. So for about a month they will have time to hatch and you will want to put a bit of food into the corner of the bin. Then once they have finished there food you can seperate the worms from the fertile soil and either store it or toss it into your garden as your worms make it. As for the new worms you will want to set up a new bin for them just like the first one. Or ofcourse if your ready you can sell them off to a bait store or to people who order from you. You will want to make sure you give them full grown worms and not babies.
  Well that's about it on feeding your worms! Hope you enjoyed it and look for my next blog of how to set up your worms home and manage your new worms they have produced.

Organic Farmer: Raising Worms! / Vermiculture

Organic Farmer: Raising Worms! / Vermiculture

Raising Worms! / Vermiculture

  Ok you've heard of the lemonaide stand, right? Make a few quarters go to the corner store and buy penny candy. Wow I remember those days. Well did you ever think of raising worms? Now a days you can go into the local hardware store and buy fertilizer ranging from plain dirt potting soil to supreme feeding fertilizer for your plants. Those bags cost $7. bucks on up and most times they aren't even a whole pound of soil!  Well here's a great solution that you can do in your basement and use the simple items you throw out every night from making dinner or cutting up cardbord boxes for the dump. Yep all you need is a couple large rubbermaid totes, a drill, some cardbord or egg cartons, veggie scraps & coffee grounds (cut up small and preferably kept a week or two to help establish microorganisms).
Steps to make a Worm Bin
1.)  Drill 10-20 holes in the lid and sides of the upper bin. (10-20 total)
2.)  Drill 4-8 holes in the bottom of upper bin
3.)  Take a couple milk cartons and place them in the bottom bin for the upper bin to rest on (you want good air flow.) Place your drilled bin on top of those milk cartons.
4.) Add thick layer of shredded cardboard in bottom of top tote (shred the cardbord up as small as a dollar bill or half that size if possible)
5.)  Add some food wastes
6.)  Add more bedding
7.)  Add more food wastes mix with a bit of garden soil (remember worms like a bit a grit)
8.)  Soak down upper layer with a spray bottle of water
9.)  Add one more layer of bedding
10.) Let the bins sit for 1-2 weeks before worm introduction, then you can add your Red Wiggler worms!

The Organic Life