Worms Gone Wild With Vermicomposting

It’s shit. Worm shit at that.?

You haven’t lived until you have had a handful of worm-castings run through your fingers while Red Wigglers wiggle in your palm.?

Mother Nature’s very own natch-u-ral steroids for your garden. Black Gold.?

That shit is unbelievable. Literally and figuratively.?

There was a time when I bred these little bad boys of nature so that I could take advantage of the nutrient-dense by-product.?

Move over manure cause papa’s got a brand new bag.

And, like everything else that I do, I take it to a dangerous level. I call it laser focus. The clinical term is possibly OCD or manic bipolar.?

I don’t have the psychology degree to differentiate the two, so I will just give you the skinny on what I do know.?

Vermicomposting is where it’s at in the gardening world.??

The layman's term is shit. Plain and simple.?

Get worms. Feed worms. Worms produce castings. AKA shit. Use casting in your garden to level up robust tomatoes, phat peppers, and longer and thicker cucumbers.?

If you’re into longer and thicker.?

I like a good pickling cucumber myself. It’s not how big the cucumber is, it’s how it tastes.

Anyway, vermicomposting.?

The process is quite simple really. It’s probably best you google the logistics of setting up your worm farm, but I will tell you a funny of how I turned it into an intervention.?

Mine.?

About 5 years back I happened to read an article about some college kids who turned their dorm room into one big worm farm.?

They sold this “black gold” to local greenhouses and garden enthusiasts and made some decent money.?

Before I even finished the article, my mind had already figured out what I needed to do.?

I was not only going to build a worm farm, but I was going to build it better at half the cost.?

After Googling suppliers of earthworms and red wigglers, I ordered a bag of 50.?

While I waited for my freaks of nature to arrive, I took that time to learn as much as I could about worms and composting.?

Turns out worms eat bacteria that form from decaying organic matter. Couple that with peat moss and paper, and you’ve got the perfect environment to raise Red Wigglers.?

One adult Wiggler lays one egg a day. They also don’t have a gullet, so you must introduce sand or eggshells to help them digest.?

Which produces the castings for your garden.?

I opted for eggshells so I could add calcium to the mix.?

Right before they arrived in the mail, I made a trip to Walmart for a large container with a lid.?

I drilled a few holes in it for air and covered the bottom with soil, strips of newspaper, and peat moss. I was ready to begin.?

In the weeks leading up to this, I started saving all the food scraps that I could find. I asked co-workers to save their banana peels and tops of strawberries.?

Leftover lettuce and some greens from outside made their way into my bin.

When the big day finally did arrive, I placed them in the container and waited. Every day I would crack open the lid hoping all the food waste was gone.?

Instead, it just sat there infested with bugs and not worms.?

What was I doing wrong? Why weren’t the worms eating this??

Undeterred, I came up with a solution. I dug out all of the worms and cleaned the box. I then added fresh bedding back into the container, but this time I saturated it with water.?

I took all the food scraps and put them in the food processor. Once I turned it into a sludge, I put the mixture back into the container and waited. And sure enough, it worked.?

By the end of the week, it was gone.?

Repeating this process for the next month, I noticed that the base of the container was filling up with castings.?

It was just taking longer than I anticipated. I needed to speed up the process. My garden needed this shit.??

That, and I was running out of paper and food waste.?

There is just so much kale and cabbage that one person can eat. Not to mention I was hounding friends to give me any and everything I could feed my worms with.?

And the solution presented itself.?

Around that time, I connected with a company that shredded its documents in-house. They were in the market to find alternatives to disposing of it but didn’t want to pay the extra recycling fee.?

I told them I would take their confetti shredded paper and get rid of it myself. So I would pick up to four 30-gallon black bags of paper once a week.?

Now mind you, I was still in the early stages of vermicomposting. My container hadn’t even reached half full yet, so I had bags of paper stashed everywhere.?

Closets, the tool shed, and even out in the yard. It was coming in faster than I could use it.?

And that is when everything clicked.?

I would process the paper right along with the organic material.?

You see, almost all vegetables are comprised of about 90% water. The worms were eating the bacteria, which also lived in the water of the decaying organic matter.?

What I did was, I separated the water and emulsified the paper with just the liquid into a thick paste. I then used that to feed the worms.?

I processed the remaining solid material with even more paper, and voila, I doubled the food.?

I ground up eggshells and a small amount of sand for digestion, which worked.?

The wigglers were eating more paper than organic material. And their population exploded.?

It takes a Red Wiggler egg 30 to 60 days to achieve adulthood. In these stages, they develop their reproductive organs. I had 50 adult worms producing one egg a day.?

In 60 days, those 50 worms produced 3,000 eggs. After another 60 days, 3,000 more eggs were introduced, but then I had 3,000 worms producing 180,000 eggs.?

Give or take an egg.?

As you can see, their population can grow quite rapidly with the right conditions and I had a steady food supply.?

After 3 months, my one container turned into 4. Two months later I purchased an additional 6.?

Now the numbers can be a bit confusing. It wasn’t all of a sudden I was flush with worms or large amounts of castings. I had to consider that not all of the young worms would reach adulthood.?

Nor was I counting out each worm and tagging them like geese in the wild, but it was growing at an alarming rate.

It began to dominate the spare bedroom. What started as feedings once a week eventually turned into once a day.?

Some mornings I would wake up and there would be handfuls of worms on the floor. They somehow wiggled out of the holes in the container and died because of the lack of hydration.?

Other times I would have to chase the dogs out of the room because any worms that did find their way out, became food for the pitbulls.?

It’s a gruesome sight to see worms coming out of the muzzle of a dog. Think Pet Cemetary.

There were worms everywhere.??

All of it got away from me. I couldn’t keep up.?

I would close the door to the room when I did have company. When anyone asked how my worms were doing, I changed the subject.?

Eventually, a close friend found worms on the stairs and investigated. And to their surprise, they found 15 plastic receptacles full of worms, and dozens of them dried out dead clinging to the walls and floor.??

Each container was filled to the brim with castings. I had never bothered to use the shit for the garden.?

That is when he sat me down and asked if I was ok.?

No one at the time thought to sit me down and act concerned about my drinking habits, but have a dozen or more boxes of worms, and people begin to think you are a threat to yourself.?

He convinced me that I had already proved to myself that I could build a worm farm. At this point, all I was doing was making a mess. The worms needed to go outside.?

I explained that the Red Wiggler would not survive the Wisconsin frost let alone the winter. The moisture in their bodies would freeze and create shards of ice inside them.?

In the end, my friend was right. I let this get out of hand and it was time to start using the casting.?

Something to point out is by this point, a year had already passed. It was springtime, and what better reason to use the worms for my garden than now??

And that is what I did.?

One Saturday morning I dragged all of the worms outside. I rototilled the garden and dumped the worms into the bed. That was it.?

That ended my days as a worm farmer.?

It took several weeks to chip the dried worms off the wall.?

My next adventure is to see if I can build an indoor apiary. I have always been fond of bees.?

Plus, I like honey.