How Many Worms Can One Bin Hold?

The conventional wisdom in the area of how many worms can one fit in a worm bin hints that you may have one pound of worms for every one square foot of surface area. A typical rubber maid tote is approximately 30x20 which would be 600 square inches. Divide that by 144 (one square foot in inches)and you get 4.16 square feet of surface area.

Following the formula- you may have 4-5 pounds of worms.

If you are buying worms- conventional wisdom would also say to start out with half your capacity and allow the worms to grow into your bin. In other words- don't calculate your maximum amount and purchase that amount, but buy half and with the space available and adequate food supply, the worms will feel free to follow their biological tendencies and start filling the bin themselves.

When it is time to harvest the castings (approximately in three months) the worms should be nearing their maximum density and you can separate them into two containers.

I have also heard numbers for different species for volume (cubic feet) of space they need. We'll cover that in another post.

History Channel Special on Worm Castings

When Neglect Is Good

I love to harass my worm bins. I figure they are mine to harass, so I do. I like to see how they are doing, how the food is decomposting, and to generally be the busy-body nosy pest as they have come to know me to be. It's my way to learn and to be a better worm farmer. I am sure they don't mind, at least there has been no verbal protest as of yet.

I also like to scan the Internet and see what others are finding. I found a great web page on daily maintenance. It was published by the Trinity Ranch Worm Farm owner. (Article).

Within the article I found a cool list of 5 things that worms need to thrive:
Air, Water, Decaying organic matter (OM), Time and the big one, Neglect.

I have found that the bins that I leave alone, do just as well as my favorite ones I like to harass, if not better. I've noticed that when the outside air temperature was hovering in the single digits this winter and I knew the heaters were on by the signal light I could see form the back window, and I decided to not venture outside for a couple of days- the worms were just fine with it.

I've noticed when I don't bother my inside bins for a couple of days- they don't mind either. Apparently as long as I give them enough munchies, they don't miss me at all.

Lesson learned- Don't sweat it! Take some time off. Leave town for the weekend. Stay inside and keep warm. As long as they have what they need (which is not generally you)- they'll be fine. Neglect is more than OK with them- it's preferred!

Chemical Fertilzer Vs. Natural Fertilizer

I found this article some time ago and it answers a lot of the questions that I had about the differences between Natural and chemical fertilizers. (Article).

Since the snow is quickly melting back in my neck of the woods, it is time to focus on the lawn once again and I thought others may appreciate the info as well as I do.

I do think the important thing to keep in mind, and it is said at one point in the article: Nature is slow moving. Don't expect fast results, just better.

Worm Grunting

Having a "Ball" with the Worms

It is always fun to count your worms when you first get them, or your first sorting. But how many worms do you have when you are 3, 6, 12 months down the road? Count them? You would have to be nuts!

How did the worm farm from which you first bought them sell them to you? By the pound. I suggest you count the same. Next time you are sorting and have nothing else to do, use the light and separate method.

Make a pile of castings or bedding (if you are really bored and just want to do something and are not ready to harvest). Place a bright light over it and then start systematically removing the top bedding and allowing the worms to dig deeper.

Eventually you will end up with a Ball O' Worms. The sound they make when they are slithering in the ball is kind of cool! Now, simply place the ball on a small kitchen scale and weigh them. If you only have a small 1 pound food scale, separate the ball into smaller groups and weigh them separately. You know, you do the math.

Once you have a grand total of the worm ball times it by 1500 for reds, 1000 for African or European Nightcrawlers, or any other "worms/pound" number you might find on a worm farm site.

And Voila! You have you worm population. I don't think you need to do your entire worm bin or bins either. Do a fair sample and times it.

It doesn't matter how accurate you are. The worms are only as many as they are. Bad math or faulty scale won't increase or decrease their number. It's just fun to be able to "see" the increase of your original group. Besides, someone at some time will ask you how many worms you have- be prepared with a somewhat real number.

Exaggerate to your friends, be conservative in your food allotment and you should be fine.

Happy Counting!

Just Add Worms

Once you have the hang of things, if you have too much too that the worms cannot eat or you are not generating enough castings- Just add worms.

You cannot hurry biology. The vermies can only eat so much, they can only "cast" so much, they can only reproduce so much. Wishing they would be faster is only a wish.

However... two pounds of worms will do it twice as fast as one pound. Four pounds will do it four times as fast, etc. etc. etc....

I know, I know- there are conditions and blah, blah, blah. But Argue that half a worm in an apple is worse than finding one. Finding two, therefore, is fantastic!

Doubter?

If you doubt at all the benefits of using castings or vermicompost as a growth enhancer for plants, try this: put some seeds in your worm bin.
Try anything. Avocado pit, peach pit, pumpkin seed, etc. and see how many grow! You will be amazed.

Just Say No

Castings. I like the word castings. It's descriptive, not exactly obvious, but easy to say without being embarrassed. Usually, the first time you say it to someone who has not yet heard the term, an explanation is due. Usually one time will do it. From that point on, anyone understands the word castings.

Worm poop, however,is not OK. I have read many papers where the writer, in explaining an aspect of vermiculture, gets to the first mention of "castings and they almost all drop the scientific or technical language and explain it as: worm poop.

No! Poop is not an adult word! It is fine to use with kids. It's OK to use on kids; site such as Herman's, or to explain potty training. I don't even care if you ask a toddler if he has poopy diapers. But that is it!

I don't think you have to be vulgar. Words such as waste, excrement, trailings, etc. all work. Be precise. It's OK. It's natural.

Make the world a better place- Say No To Poop!

Is it an egg or cocoon?

As I ventured into the vermiculture world, one thing that seemed very obvious to me was that worm people spoke a different language and that the language had to be correct. One of these new vocabulary words was the “cocoon”.

Worms reproduce via a cocoon. Or at least that’s how the story goes. After reading about how this happens and finding my first “cocoons”, I wondered, why isn’t this called an egg? It looks like an egg. The worms emerging from the cocoon didn’t go in as worms and come out for the “rebirth” as butterflies, or sprout any wings, legs, or otherwise. In fact, it wasn’t a rebirth at all. I thought, “I am going to fight this! I am going to get the worm cocoon reclassed as an egg!” The problem with thinking is that I shouldn’t do too much of it, because I was wrong.

Just because my knowledge of cocoons is based solely on the caterpillar does not mean I am an expert on cocoons. My raising chickens or 40 some years of breakfast didn’t make me an expert on eggs either. Luckily before I began my crusade, I looked up the two words in the dictionary.

Cocoon: The silky envelope spun by the larvae of many insects, as silkworms, serving as a covering while they are in the pupal stage or any of various similar protective coverings in nature, as the silky case in which certain spiders enclose their eggs.

Egg: The roundish reproductive body produced by the female of certain animals, as birds and most reptiles, consisting of an ovum and its envelope of albumen, jelly, membranes, egg case, or shell, according to species.

Since the “object in question” serves as a protection to the fertilized eggs, and is made by the parent and because the “object in question” does not come exclusively from the female (since there isn’t one), the “object in question” must be a cocoon.

I will have to make my stand elsewhere!

Two Tailed Worm

Found this little guy while sorting through a bin. Too much coffee??

The Set-Up

The story began when the family decided to go fishing. A few of us ventured out back after dark and began hunting for night crawlers in the area that I had heavily watered earlier in the day. We were amazed to catch a good number of them and we placed them into an empty Gatorade container to be used as bait the next day at Trial Lake.

We had great fun and success the first day fishing, so he decision was made to do the same the next week. We repeated the same ritual of catching night crawlers the night before heading to the lake. This time at the lake, we found ourselves using the entire supply of night crawlers and left when the bait was no more.

We decided to go a third time. This time we caught many, many night crawlers so as not to run out on this trip. We took 96. We used a lot of them, but when we came back, we had maybe 20 or 30 left. The best thing may have been to return the worms to the soil, but I had an idea…the start of many ill fated adventures!

My idea went back to the time I spent with my grandfather in summers long gone. We fished nearly every weekend at Strawberry reservoir. We would, during the week, shock worms up out of the yard and place them into an old refrigerator that had been ¾ buried in the shade of the northern side of the southern fence.

Inside the refrigerator, or worm bin, was a layer of soil and then layers of burlap sack. Within the layers of burlap the worms would find coffee grounds, kitchen scraps, and moisture. The night crawlers, once removed from the lawn, would find a home in the soil and plenty of night crawler social life within the layers of burlap.

When it became time for fishing, one needed only to lift open the door of the worm bin and pick through a couple of layers of burlap to find all the worms one would need for a weekend of fishing. When we returned, the remaining worms would go back into the bin and replacement crawlers caught during the week. The goal was always to replace more than what we had used.

Upon returning from Trial Lake, I decided to start my own worm bin. I wanted to eliminate the need to catch worms the night before and somehow begin a sustainable population of my own and maybe recreate the memories and fondness I held for those times spent with my grandfather but this time with my children.

So as any great idea that needs further information in our age, I “Googled” “raising night crawlers”.

Google-ing Worms

Google is a wonderful thing.
A few flicks of the fingertips and I was deluged with the all the facts, myths and wonders of a new world called Vermicomposting. I quickly found that the night crawlers that I was holding in hopes of a new "Segmented Empire" were not highly praised as worms worth raising. Instead there were other breeds that not only could be worms as it pertained to fishing bait, but were also a powerful tool in generating soil and recycling. These other worms were not single faceted but…well, multi-faceted! These super worms were the African and the European Night crawler and the Red worm.

What’s A Worm?- Part 1

Bait is bait.

The Northern or Canadian night crawlers to which I was so accustomed, are the Premier in this category. They are fat and juicy and grow big. They, however, do not grow fast. In fact they grow so slowly that it is considered nearly impossible to raise them in a bin structure. You might be able to keep them alive for long periods of a time, they may even grow big and fat, but they will not establish a self-sustaining population of any size; maybe for a small personal stash, but it could never be expanded into a commercial endeavor. Northerns are harvested on golf courses and farm land at night wit guys with lights and buckets. They are then boxed and sent out to fishermen everywhere. In one report that I saw, Canada reported over 500,000,000 night crawlers were exported. Wow!

African and European night crawlers are not as big and they are not as fat, but they grow fast and don’t mind being housed and raised in bins. One day, they might challenge the Northerns but only because of their tolerance to heat. No more explaining to the wife why the worms are in the cooler or worse, the refrigerator!

Red worms are just not big. They may work fine for small fish and small hooks, but what’s the fun in that??!!

What’s A Worm?- Part 2

Is bait the only thing for which a worm is good?

No, they are also soil builders. In nature, everything has a job to do. If we leave worms alone, the will happily go about their business of producing top rate soil that plants will die for…actually live for. You see the role of a composting worm is to devour decomposing organic material and leave behind rich soil. This soil, called castings (which is worm manure), is everything a plant could dream of. It provides moisture retention, microbes that allow the plant to drink more easily and the soil conditioner that allows for great aeration and body.

Northerns are “soil dwellers", meaning they like to dig in the dirt. They, I found, like to dig down deep where the soil is cool and when it is wet enough, tunnel their way to the surfaces. Although they like to dig in the dirt, they don’t like to dig new tunnels, but instead maintain networks of tunnels that connect them to their burrows. Within these burrows, they will drag leaves, grass and other organic material form the surface and to eat at their leisure. These networks of tunnels are great for the aeration of the soil, and provide for a great method of transferring materials form the subsoil to the top soil and vice versa. They are not great at the process of composting, at least not like the other worms.

African and European Night crawlers and Red worms are composting worms. The kings are the red worms. They reproduce like crazy, eat from 50-100% of their weight each day in organic material and can produce almost the same amount of castings. The castings can then be added to any soil or used as a top dressing to dramatically improve plant growth. Studies have shown a 3-5 times increase in growth rate of the plants planted in the casting enhanced soil over plants in natural soil or even potting soil. The worms themselves can make the world a green place.

Having bait around is good, but if that bait can also help grow the lawn, plants and the garden grow better as well, the choice of worms to raise becomes more clear.

What’s A Worm? Part 3

Organic material?

Like what kind of organic material am I talking about? Kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, shredded newspaper, cardboard and paper. Many of the things we just throw out or wash down the garbage disposal and into the sewer system. If every pound of composting worms eat one pound of material or garbage every two days, can that make a difference? Every pound of garbage that worms dispose of is one pound that doesn’t make it into the landfill or sewer system. And every pound of garbage consumed, equals about one pound of new soil generated. It is a perfect recycling system.

The process is called vermicomposting. It works the same way that the traditional composting process works, only using worms to do the work, at least most of it. If the right kind of worm is used and they are given the right conditions, they will work for their entire lives, happy as…well as worms in a worm bin.

This piece of information really caught my attention! I could see that I could make a difference. If I could get enough worms to divert our family’s garbage from the garbage, I could save about a pound a day from going to the landfill and wasting water to run the disposal and sending more items to the sewer system. If we could divert one pound a day, that would be 365 pounds a year. Yeah I know, big deal. But what if I could also convince 100 other people to change. Or a thoudsand. Or Ten thousand. My 365 pounds could become 3,650,000 pounds of garbage diverted form the landfill.

That much garbage would produce at least 3,000,000 pounds of top soil, that would in turn help the plants grow better, which helps the production of oxygen, and creates more green space which creates a cooling effect of that area.

In addition, the soil could retain more water, reducing the demand for increased watering, and reducing the need for chemical fertilizers that leach nutrients out of the soil and places contaminants into the ground water.

I’m not smart enough to create an alternative fuel to screw the Mideast and oil guys, but I can change the world by recycling garbage, at least my little part of it. And by beginning a worm composting business to help others begin their vermicomposting efforts, I believe we can make a difference…from the ground up.

The Africans Arrive!

Once the decision was made to venture into the worm industry, one web site that I found appealing and full of basic information was UNCO industries. They were offering a “cultured” night crawler. I assumed this may have been a northern night crawler that had been harnessed enough to learn how to be used as a compost worm. I took the bait as it was and ordered a pound of them.

I was intrigued with their offer to view their business proposal, but did not want to spend the $45 to view the video. I figured I would still want to venture into the business slowly.

I received the worms and thus began the Jensen Worm Farm.