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Post by hoosierheightsfarm on Dec 22, 2007 10:28:49 GMT -5
Bought some worms from Alan lastnight. I ripped up some newspaper and got a couple of handfuls of leaves out of the yard. Dumped in the worms and.....well they were squirming when I last saw them.
I'm excited. My wife was less than.
I put the tote they are living in in the kitchen next to the trashcan, so as we throw things away, the worm-friendly items can go in the box.
Patrick
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Post by plantsnobin on Dec 22, 2007 11:12:23 GMT -5
Don't you just love them??? What does your daughter think of them? I put all of the ones I got in the same bin, but I am getting ready to go out and build a wooden box for some of them. I prefer wood to plastic, as the wood breathes and they are not as likely to get too wet, but you do have to keep them from drying out too much. I just love the worms-but then I really should get out of the house more. Karen
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Post by Alan on Dec 22, 2007 17:19:55 GMT -5
Glad you guys are happy and excited about your worms. Don't worry Patrick, your wife may actually learn and grow to love them, exspecially after she sees how efficient they are at what they do and how valuable their castings are for house plants and the garden.
Karen, wood definetly does a better job at draining than plastic, like you said you just have to keep then watered a little more which is no big deal. I decided today that I'm going to throw up another 30-40 feet of worm house, at least by this next fall, in time I'm going to buy another 20 X 48 and attempt to make some of those flow through beds like in the video at which point I'll buy a manure spreader and hopefully all of my fertilizer will come from on farm.
-Alan
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Post by Alan on Dec 22, 2007 17:21:12 GMT -5
BTW, It was good talking to both of you yesterday and had a lot of fun, thanks for the good, intelligent conversations we had yesterday and once again thanks to you Karen for allowing me to borrow those books and the growing for market magazines, I really appreciate the wealth of information you have shared with me.
-Alan
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Post by plantsnobin on Dec 22, 2007 18:01:58 GMT -5
It's always good to get a chance to talk to you. We should have a party and invite everyone here! I think with the wood versus plastic, folks should probably ask themselves how they take care of their houseplants-do you tend to overwater or underwater. The overwaterers might want to stick with wood, the underwaters could use plastic. Everyone should have worms. I think if people could see first hand what the worms can do, everyone would want tons. I really am interested in maybe 'splitting' a greenhouse with you when time comes to purchase. I won't have room for a 98' when the highway comes through, but I should have room for 'half'. I had Mike help me with getting new stovepipe for a small stove I put in the greenhouse today, and he was talking about what I could for next year, so maybe I can talk him into more than I thought. He doesn't usually say things like 'next year'-it's more like "why don't you forget about trying to sell anything and just have your garden for fun. Can't blame him any, I have lost more money doing this that if I had a drug or gambling habit.
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Post by sandbar on Dec 23, 2007 1:46:19 GMT -5
Everyone should have worms. You know, depending upon how you read that statement ...  Maybe, but at least you are at home safe and sound!  OK, now my serious question ... if you have worms and discarded garbage in a plastic tote next to your trash can ... doesn't it get a bit rank?  This all sounds very interesting to me, however, I can easily predict DW's response when I tell her I want to grow worms in garbage in the kitchen ... |
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Post by plantsnobin on Dec 23, 2007 11:14:08 GMT -5
Everyone will probably have a bad experience when starting out, and getting the hang of it-you will over water or underwater and lose some worms, but with a little time you will get the hang of what they need. The worms I have in the house in small plastic bins the size of a shoebox, I have them in shredded newspaper ONLY. I mist them, but I don't feed them anything-they eat the newspaper. Outside the bins are fed a bit of chicken feed, or rabbit manure. The key is not to overfeed, that is when you it would get smelly. If you could sneak some in the house when she was gone, you could keep them in a hidden spot and she would never know. What other pet can you have that doesn't bark, scratch the door to be let out, or cost you anything to feed?
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Post by hoosierheightsfarm on Dec 23, 2007 15:45:10 GMT -5
My wife wanted to put about 12 oranges in the tote lastnight. I told her *THAT* would make it stink. We have to let them get caught up on what I've put in there already, then add to it.
I don't think she'll ever "love" the worms.
My daughter thought they were neat, and wanted to hold one, but she said it was yucky and threw it back in the box.
Patrick
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Post by plantsnobin on Dec 23, 2007 15:56:22 GMT -5
Dairy products, meat, grease and citric peels are things that should be avoided in the worm bin. What's nice about having chickens is that you can give them your food leftovers that shouldn't go to the worms.
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Post by Alan on Dec 23, 2007 23:49:08 GMT -5
You can give the worms the oranges as long as you lime them just don't give them the peel of the oranges because they don't react well to the limeonine (sp?) in the peels, and go easy on feeding them very many oranges because of the moisture. I forgot to tell you that the other night, sorry.
I think your wife will learn to like them in time, once she sees what they do and how efficient they are at it.
-Alan
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Post by Alan on Dec 26, 2007 22:33:16 GMT -5
Just wanted to check with you guys and see how the worm farming is going? My beds are building back up after the big compost harvest and the past couple of warm days has led to a lot of eating as well as cacoon laying, it looks like I'll have another nice bumper crops of worms for next summer which along with fishing season and the expansion of the worm operation will be necessary, it is absolutly crazy the number of fishing worms that leave this farm every week for lakes all over the beautiful Kentuckiana countryside!
Last year our worms were even regular visitors to the great lakes!
-Alan
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Post by plantsnobin on Dec 27, 2007 9:15:26 GMT -5
The worms are doing great. I added your worms to one of my existing boxes because I didn't get that new wooden box built (maybe today). I am very excited about the prospects for the worms. It's kind of funny that my grandfather raised worms when I was a kid. I never really thought that much about doing it myself as a commercial thing. He kept them in wooden boxes in a cellar under the garage and outdoors in a big pile of aged manure at the edge of the woods. He sold lots of fishing worms, but 30 years ago nobody would really have thought much of using the castings. He also sold veggie plants from a tiny little homemade greenhouse, and I don't remember him using any commercial potting soil, so maybe he did use the worm compost as his medium.
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Post by kimikat on Dec 30, 2007 9:59:32 GMT -5
Worm rangling is sort of an art form. You really have to pay attention to what you're doing, and as long as you keep things balanced in you bin, the only smell you have is that of freshly turned over soil. I learn something new every day I help Alan with them...Like how to MANUALLY harvest of them out of the bins. You have to be really careful not to mix their food in with their bedding. Or they'll get to hot. I knew the latter part of that statement. But it didn't occur to me to pull the bedding from the far side of the bin to the side where the food is, so that there is as little mixing as possible.
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Post by johno on Dec 30, 2007 12:26:31 GMT -5
I wish I could remember the names of the books... I checked out some old books from the county library a few years ago about worms, compost, farming, etc. I think there was one that went into the wooden crate worm bins, but I recall reading a lot about large, outdoor operations.
In one system, there were long, in-ground concrete bins. They filled them with a mix of manure, bedding, and leaves, mainly, and threw in pretty much any other O.M. Seems like they kept them covered, somehow. It produced well, but I want to say it was slower than the other system?..
The other one was on a farm with livestock. The old dude just opened a large, shallow pit with his tractor blade and filled it with manure and bedding (cow, horse, both?..) He then dug up all but a few inches of the vermicompost and worms and spread it on his gardens. I don't remember the figures, but it seems like this method produced the most worms, even though there was really no containment.
Have any of you tried a large-scale outdoor method?
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Post by cff on Dec 30, 2007 15:38:44 GMT -5
Johno"
I use 250 gallon plastic liquid totes for my worm beds, I cut each one down to measure fore feet square and three feet deep. The totes are situated under my rabbit pens; I lay hay on top of the rabbit pens for the rabbits to nibble on and some will fall through the pens into the worm bins along with the manure. These make pretty big bins at no cost, I just don't have enough worms till fill any more or my little deal would be bigger.
I've seen Internet pictures of large concrete beds somewhere before, and recently I was looking at a web sight of a NY dairy who was using huge worm beds to handle the dairy manure on a professional scale
I would really like to build up numbers over the next few years, if the numbers really go well I wouldn't mind trying to build something more professional looking. Right now it seems like I just stumble from one problem to the next with my worms.
Yesterday I started to turn one of the beds with a seed fork and found fire ants (or they found me actually) Now I really got to do something to get rid of that mess ASAP
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