I am wanting to place an order but first need your expertise. I am wanting to purchase the worms and nightcrawlers as feeders for my 40+ frogs. I would like to set up a system where they possibly breed and I have an endless flow of worms. I have two seperate Sterlite bins, one for the wigglers and one for the nightcrawlers and I have layered them as follows…

damp cardboard
coffee grinds
damp newspaper
romainne lettuce
damp cardboard
coffee grinds
damp newspaper
banana peels
little bit of top soil
 
I have been allowing the bins to cure (rot) for around a week now. Does this sound like it will be successful? Thanks for your time!

Hey Jerry I wanted to thank you for the great red wigglers that i received. They are very efficient and seem to be doing their job quite nicely.  I had a quick question. I am now filtering my first batch after I got the red wigglers and getting some great soil but I was wondering what you use to filter the leaves from the soil and also how you seperate the worms and their eggs/coccons from the soil. Any help would be appreciated it.

thanks
Dr Luis

Hi Dr. Luis,

You are very welcome. Sounds like everything is going well for you.

If you still have a lot of leaves in there, it is not yet time to harvest. If I remember correctly, you haven’t had your worms for that long. If that is true, you will not yet have that many castings built up yet. Keep the worms alive and they will do what they do…eat, poop, breed. More worms means faster breakdown into castings and your leaves will “Disappear” over time.

It sounds like you are excited to use your castings. That’s great. You could always just pull out a couple of handfuls of castings to feed your plants. If you want to do a full harvest, you will need to wait until the worms break down the leaves…or, unless you plan on getting into the casting business, there is no real reason to filter out the leaves. They are just organic material and will not cause any harm. They just don’t “LOOK” as pretty as finished castings.

Multiple ways to get the worms out of their castings. You can push everything to one side and put some rotting vegetation covered with fresh bedding on the other. The worms will come to the food. Another way is to dump the contents of your bin outside in the light on a tarp. Make several piles and walk away for 30 minutes. When you come back out, most of your worms will be at the bottom of those piles in an attempt to get away from the light.

Forget about trying to screen the cocoons…it’s a losing battle without a commercial harvester with special screens. Not a big deal because you will accumulate more worms than you had anyway.

Just remember, worms are like ants. You will lose several hundred (Or drive yourself NUTS trying to salvage them all), but you will have gained several thousand. Not a bad trade off.

Have you been reading all about Alabama Jumpers?  These strong worms actually JUMP!   If you’ve been looking for a commercial worm to help aerate your garden, these are them!

Alabama Jumpers are great for aerating soil, even heavy clay soil!   Basically, Jumpers are what I refer to as, “ The Lazy Man’s Worm”.  Why?  Because all you need to do is throw a nice thick layer of leaf litter or finished compost on your soil, keep damp, and you are DONE!   The best part is that Alabama Jumpers cannot harm your plants.  They only eat rotting material!

You’ve just created a habitat where your Jumpers will have reason to stick around and eat, poop, and breed.  Soon you’ll have tons of little Jumpers.  You’ll recognize the baby Jumpers because of their distinctive JUMP. 

Calling all Fisherman……Jumpers will grow extremely large.  Because these are the most active nightcrawlers available, fish  go NUTS for Jumpers. 

Here is a deal to make ANYONE Jump!  1,000 Alabama Jumpers are normally priced at $79 plus shipping.  For a limited time, Alabama Jumpers are available from www.TheWormDude.com for only $59 plus shipping.

These worms will go fast and this offer can be pulled at any time.  If you want Jumpers, NOW’S THE TIME TO JUMP!

You are looking at a close up of Black Soldier Fly Larve.  BSFL are among the world’s most efficient composters.   I haven’t seen scientific data to support this, but from experience they are at least 50X more efficient than worms at composting waste.

Do you want to compost mass quantities of waste such as:   citrus peel, meat, coffee grounds,  even large amounts of horse manure?   BSFL Grubs will do it!   NO CHOPPING NECESSARY!   The grubs do not bite people, but give them some rotting vegetation and BAM!!! … All you will see is a mass of grubs devouring the scraps.

My wife is a big grapefruit fan….and every day I feed my grubs her grapefruit waste…..and every day the grubs eat it…ALL!   BSFL will reduce waste by about 95%!  The  fry (poop) they produce looks similar to sawdust and is basically odorless.  Coincidentally, worms LOVE BSFL  poop.

BSFL  are GREAT for fishing, and are GREAT sources of protein for chickens and reptiles. 

Black Soldier Fly Larve eventually pupate and turn into Soldier Flies.  Soldier Flies are large, slow moving flies (Resembling wasps) that have NO MOUTHS (They are not germ carrying vectors like house flies).  The Soldier Flies live only days.  During this time they mate and look for a place near rotting vegetation to lay their eggs.   Soldier Flies would not want to come into your house as they LOVE sunlight.  The flies that have hatched in my garage can be seen buzzing around my garage door window looking to get out as soon as I open the door.  As soon as the Soldier Fly lays it’s eggs, it dies within hours.

If you want a starter batch of Black Soldier Fly Larve you can order now and they will be shipped out within 2 weeks.  They can be found on my site at http://www.thewormdude.com/products-page/the-bio-pod-plus  I carry not only the grubs themselves but also the Biopod Plus, the only commercial system made that self harvests the bsfl.

If you look back a couple weeks in my blog, you will see a small pumpkin plant.  Here is that small plant a few weeks later!    This plant grows so fast, you can almost watch it grow.  My wife is starting to get afraid of the plant, as if it would run after her…haha…..na, maybe it would crawl after her, but run, I don’t think so!

I like to refer to my pumpkin plant as “Pumpkinzilla”!  We’ve already got a dozen or so mini soccer ball sized pumpkins growing.  By next week I expect them to be beach ball size.

Keep in mind there is no trick photography here…no “Special” seeds (In fact this was just a volunteer plant that I let grow).   The most important thing to know is that I’m no great gardener.  In fact, my idea of a garden is to dig a hole, add  castings, ask my wife to water the  area every once in awhile, and walk away.  How lazy is that?

So…as the headline of  this blog says, “What’s the SECRET to GIANT Plants”? 

Nothing but WORMS and WORM CASTINGS!

How many people can say they flew to Hawaii for a business trip?  I can!   Well, my trip was definitely not all business, but I did make sure I spent a morning with my favorite Waikiki Vermiculture expert,  Mindy Jaffee (In Picture above), Owner of Waikiki Worms. 

If you are ever lucky enough to visit Mindy,  you will be amazed at the first rate job she has done with her shop.  Classy and Professional are two words that best describe Waikiki Worms.

Mindy sells a LOT of Worm Inn’s, and she  is a HUGE proponent of these great composting units.  Besides having several Worm Inn’s  in front of her store as attention getters, Mindy has a working model inside her store so her customers can see just how simple it is to process all your produce waste.

Now that I’m home, it’s back to reality for me.  I can’t say I’m not a bit jealous of Mindy living the dream in Oahu.

I have a tray system and it has worked beautifully for about a year.  It has been very hot here in NYC lately and I just went to check them after about 2 weeks or so and my worms are all gone!  So bodies, no smell.  The leftover stuff they left is no drier or wetter than normal.
My babies are gone!  They didn’t even leave a note!  Any ideas of what happened?  Could they have decomposed within a week or so??
Thanks…

Hi Mike,

I’m sorry to hear about your worms.   Losing your worms is not a good experience.  I’m going to make a couple of assumptions here:

I’m going to assume you have something on the bottom of the bottom tray so the worms didn’t end up sitting in the standing water in the base?

I’m going to assume your bin is in total shade?  If the outside of your bin gets warm to the touch….worms are starting to fry.

Without seeing the situation, I can only guess at what happened.  If it ’s not either of the above items, what likely happened is that your existing food scraps broke down very quickly, turning into a vinegar solution for your worms.  That is the fastest way to kill a healthy herd.

Although your weather has been very hot, that would not normally kill your worms. 

It sounds like you enjoyed your worms.  Don’t let one bad incident turn you off.  We’ve all been through it. 

One Tomato, two Tomato, Three Tomato, Four……..

My WormyPonics system is doing even better than I would have  predicted.    Remember, these are all vegetables grown without chemical nutrients.  The mixture used here is all organic.  ALL I do is add water every other week or so.

Check out the lush growth here.    Hydroponic stores make their money selling nutrients, but not only are they expensive, they require different products at different times.  That’s ridiculous!

I know what I’m going to be researching this week…Salsa Recipes!

If you want to get started  in  WormyPonics,  you can get everything you need on my ordering  page… http://www.thewormdude.com/products-page/wormyponics

Is this something out of Jurassic Park?  Considering this plant is growing over a foot every day, maybe it is!  Scroll down a bit.  This is the same plant I have pictures of just 10 days ago (below).

This is what happens when you plant in well aerated soil (Thanks Alabama Jumpers),  that is loaded with beneficial bacteria (Thanks Red Wiggler Castings).

The best part is I haven’t done ANYTHING!   The worms did and continue to do all the work.

No special camera,  no special tricks,  just good healthy soil that is feeding the plants…like nature intended.

Would you like your garden to look like this?  It could.

1)  Collect or purchase a foot or two of leaf litter mulch.

2)  Keep damp

3)  Add Alabama Jumpers.

4)  Plant your plants.

5)  Add a couple handfuls of worm castings around the base of each plant.

Read through my blog.  You will see that this is not anything extraordinary.  EVERYTHING I plant looks like this.  No bone meal, blood meal, Synthetic Junk or book reading needed.  Just pick out some plants that you would LOVE to produce for you, and you’re good to go.

After a couple of difficult months,  Our Famous Alabama Jumpers are BACK! 

For those of you that don’t know about these incredible worms,  Alabama Jumpers are the best garden worm commercially available for soil aeration.  Unlike  composting worms that are soft bodied and will perish in your soil as soon as their food scraps are gone,  Alabama Jumpers are strong, thick skinned worms that require a minimum of care.

Simply add rotting leaf litter or finished compost to your soil, along with a little moisture,  and the Jumpers will have everything they need to aerate your garden.  Because they only eat decaying organic material, they will not harm your plants at all. 

Although we make every attempt to ship your Jumpers within one week of your order, we are currently filling  a large number of backlogged orders.  In some cases, there may be up  to a two week delay before your worms are shipped.    Upon receipt of your order I will let you know the planned shipping date for shipping of your Jumpers.  If you will be going away on vacation, simply respond to my email and I can arrange to have your order shipped at your convenience.