Composting Red Worms

Thank you for the great information.
I understand that red worms will eat most
fruits and vegetables.  If you focus
on more sweeter foods, does it have an effect
on the castings?  For example...can you change
the effect of the castings, based on
the diet?  or is the compost the same,
 no matter what you feed them? (obviously as
long as their diet consists of recommended foods,
 not oily, dairy, meats, or
others,)  Thank you for your time.

-Chris

Thanks Chris for your question. It is a very good question. In fact, from what I have read and seen, I’m not sure that anyone knows the answer to this question for certain. Much research is still being done on the effect on castings. I’m not aware of any that have been done or that are currently being done that differentiate castings produced from different feed stocks. Based on my current knowledge, I will provide my best guess as to how feedstock may affect the quality of the castings.

Worm castings are known for their microorganisms that help drought tolerance, disease and pest resistance, along with a ton of other good things for plants. Worms create these microoganisms while they are digesting their food. Their digestive tract is designed to select the good helpful microorganisms and eat the bad ones. Meaning that whatever the worms eat comes out better than what it put in, as far as microogranisms go.

The only difference feedstocks will really have on the quality of the castings is the nutrient content(my hypothesis). The worms can’t magically create nitrogen or phosphorus, all they do is help promote good microorganism to thrive. Since castings are often so expensive, people don’t typically worry about the nutrient content of the castings as much, since you only use a little bit of castings per plant anyway. The idea is to get the nutrient content of your soil correct first, then add the castings in for all of the great benefits the microorganisms provide.

Hope this answers your question. If anyone else has a question. Please feel free to contact me through the contact page. I would be happy to answer them!

A lot of people wonder how fast worms reproduce, how many worms are in a cocoon, how often does a worm make a cocoon etc. I figured I would try to figure out some of these things experimentally. So I grabbed a few cocoons out of my European Nightcrawler worm bin and a few cups:

Worm Cocoon

Above is a picture of a worm cocoon, you can click on it to make it bigger. My camera isn’t the greatest so it was hard to get a good shot. It should at least help you tell the relative size and color of a cocoon. There were a few worm castings on it as well, those were the black things. Well, I grabbed two cocoons and two cups and put one cocoon in each cup.

Worm Experiment

Well there are the cups. Here is a look inside one of them:

Cocoon Experiment

I added a little bit of bedding back in so the worms have somewhere to be when they hatch. I was carefull not to get any more cocoons. I wish I had some more spare bedding. I’m afraid they will dry out. I finished it off, by putting a newspaper cover on top and using a ruberband to secure the newspaper. I’ll report to you guys later the results… hopefully I keep it moist and everything works out.

I harvested my worm bin a week or two ago. I took out a bunch of castings to put in my garden and put the rest of the worms back into a new bin with composted horse manure as the bedding. Sorry I don’t have any pictures from that.

I harvested the castings the long, boring, hard way. I sorted everything by hand. I have really neglected the bin for a long time and it really needed to be harvested. It had been about a year since I started it and I had never harvested it!

I’m starting to take a lot better care of my worms now and am no longer neglecting them. When I harvested, I only had 1/2 lb of worms when I started with 1lb. YIKES! Looking at the bin now, there are a ton of baby worms and I’m pretty sure my population is growing. I’m going to keep track of their weight next time I harvest to see how fast they are reproducing. I don’t totally remember when I harvested, but I am going to say it was on 6/6/09 just so I have a fairly accurate reference point and I don’t forget later on.

So here is a look inside my bin:

Inside my European Worm bin

There does seem to be a good amount of fungus gnats, I may try to let the bin dry a little to try to get rid of them as the bin was on the wet side anyhow. There were also a few seeds that had shot up pretty quickly, I just plucked the fruit out of the dirt and let the worms eat it.

Up next I will write about my experiment to see how many worms hatch from a European Nightcrawlre cocoon.