January 2019
The Elite Worm Breeding Course
Early last fall (2018), my good friend Larry Shier told me he had put together a course focused on serious worm breeding.
My initial thought – “Cool!”
And then he told me his planned price…$199* USD
My next thought, “Whoah!”
I’m not gonna lie – I thought he was a bit crazy to charge so much for a web-based worm farming training course.
But what’s funny is that if you asked me now, I’d say he’s not charging enough – and I’ll explain why a little further along.
Fast forward to November… and Larry invited me to check out the course: Elite Worm Breeding. I had just finished (more…)
**Want Even More Fun With Worms? Sign Up for the RWC E-mail List Today!**Urban Worm Bag – 01-14-19
Back near the beginning of December I wrote about my plans to (finally) get my Urban Worm Bag 2.0 up and running – and to do so with a bit of (controversial?) flair!
Rather than simply starting yet another kitchen-scrap-processing system, I thought it would be fun to test out cat litter wastes (from a box that uses compostable, clumping litter) as a worm food.
I had originally planned to try processing everything, but another experience vermicomposter – who has been processing cat wastes for quite some time – talked me down from the ledge (haha), suggesting it might make more sense to (more…)
European Nightcrawlers – 2 Worm Challenge!
If you’re on the email list, or you’ve even just been following the blog as of late, You’ll likely know that I’m on a bit of a “deep dive” in terms of wanting to learn more about cocoon production (and the important factors of influence).
My primary focus has been on cocoon production in Red Worms, simply because I had (almost) accepted the sad fact that I didn’t have any European Nightcrawlers left.
🙁
The last of my Euros had been left in a small system down in my basement – and not only was it very badly neglected, but a Red Worm population also ended up getting established (these two factors do NOT help Euros do well)! By the time I got around to rescuing the system last fall, all the worms were incredibly tiny (basically hatchling size) – and it was very difficult to even tell if there were any Euros left at all.
I thought I might have found one or two, based on their striping, but I really wasn’t sure.
As it turns out, my “rescue system” was (more…)
Vermi-Bag – 01-09-19
In the last update I mentioned my plan to finally harvest my VermiBag system (that had been up and running for about 4 months at the time). It had been neglected quite a bit, so I decided I should probably feed it fairly heavily first, in an effort to draw most of the worms up closer to the surface.
Well, I must say they went completely crazy for all that pumpkin I added – and it really seemed like my wood chip mix helped to balance it out nicely as well. The upper zone was crawling with “happy” Red Worms in no time.
As it turned out, I put off my harvesting plans during the holidays and then – much more recently – added yet another BIG load of pumpkin.
NOTE: I definitely don’t recommend adding this much of any type of food waste at one time. It is also a good idea to add in pockets or trenches so you are not completely covering the surface the way I did. (My “excuse” is that I’ve been doing this nearly 20 years now – and have a reasonable idea of what I can and can’t get away with – lol)
😉
So yeah, it was a big dump of pumpkin waste that had been (more…)
Cocoon Production in Different Materials – Day 21
I guess it’s been almost 21 days since my last blog post, since the one before this was my original post in this series! lol
Anywho…
I have some interesting results to share from my Tiny Tub 4-Worm Cocoon Production experiment! Just to quickly review – back in late December, I set up 3 little systems using sour cream tubs, and added 4 “breeder” Red Worms to each of them. One of the tubs had only aged manure as the habitat/food material, another one had wood chips (with leaves chipped in as well) + a small amount of the manure, while the third contained shredded corrugated cardboard + a small amount of the manure (same amount as in wood chip bin).
The basic idea was to see how cocoon production differed between the systems over time.
I ended up doing an assessment on Day 10 (and shared the results with the email list – but not here on the blog).
Here are the cocoon count numbers for Day 10: (more…)