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I raise earthworms in a bucket and a plastic container full of dirt for fishing with grandchildren. Their staple food is coffee grounds, upon which they thrive (the worms, not the grandchildren). I bury the grounds in the bottom half of the bucket so that they won’t be gobbled up by maggots. My minor problem has been getting enough coffee grounds. We can only drink so much. My major problem has become my better half’s resentment of “that smelly can” in which I collect the grounds until I have enough for a feeding.

Yesterday I went into a Starbucks in town and asked the young lady behind the counter what they did with their used grounds. “We recycle them,” she replied with great earnestness and the self-righteous environmental correctness which pervades places like that. The young man working next to her leaned over the counter and said, “She means we recycle them into the landfill,” which was both funny and truthful. I asked if I could have them and was rewarded with a BIG plastic bag with enough coffee grounds to feed every worm in this part of the country for a while.

So, if you raise wiggly worms, stop by your local coffee shop, even if you don’t care for overpriced brew with pretentious names, and ask if you can help them with their recycling.
Happy fishing,
Lou 13.5 ac.

I'm afraid that Alabama will soon be overrun with snobbish earthworms in various flavors.

BM :

Don't worry about that as those Ala. worms are way to down to earth to get snobby. Plus those worms came from good old red Ala. dirt and won't easily change in taste or color. Now you know those worms are just like their owners ,and like all us southerners , and for that matter like all us pondbosses , we are always taking all the left-overs and discards (like pipe ,boards ,gravel ,xmas trees, spare parts, old equipment and free fish) and it hasn't changed or harmed us any. So rest easy friend.

Good idea heronblu!

I'll have the no-fat, half-mocha, half-latte cappucino red wigglers, with just a dash of cinnamon.
The LEXUS of worms

heronblu, good idea, thanks for posting it.

heronblu -- I am interested in your home made worm farm. Can you educate us further? Would you please provide more details about how you grow these worms? I have numerous questions, please bear with me.

1. What type of worms are they? garden worms, leaf worms, night crawlers, redworms?

2. HOw big of a bucket do you use?

3. Where do you store the bucket while the worms grow and multiply?.

4. How often do you have to add new coffee grounds? Is all that you add are coffee grounds? How many grounds do you add each time?
How do you get the gounds to bottom of the bucket. Dump it out, and refill?

5. How many worms are in the bucket at any one time?. Do they get overcrowded and need thinning? HOw often?

6. Any major worm die offs?

7 What temperature seems to be best for growing these worms?

8. Do you have to add moisture to the bucket and how often?.

9. Do you keep a lid on the bucket? If so does the lid have holes in it?

10. How long have you been doing this?

11. Any photos to the operation?

Thanks for the advice.

This is really going to be embarrassing.

1. What type of worms? Garden worms and just plain wigglers that come from a bait shop out on the highway and look like garden worms to me.
2. What kind of bucket? One 5 gal. bucket and one storage bin, maybe 20 gal. I don’t fill them above 3/4.
3. Where do I store? In the garage.
4. As to feeding- I have been adding grounds whenever I had a full coffee can, but this was just not enough carbon and would not keep the numbers up high enough, so I started adding torn up paper (which I read somewhere was a great source of non-smelly carbon for worms when it deteriorated in the soil) and chopped up rinds, etc. in small amounts. I microwaved the rinds briefly to kill off any fly eggs when I used them.
I do the adding by dumping the bucket and putting the dirt back in reverse order (‘cause the top is pretty dry and the bottom is pretty wet). When about half is back in, I mix the grounds into it, then return the rest of the dirt. The only real problem I have had is that if very many grounds are mixed in the upper layers of soil, flies lay eggs, maggots hatch, and soon there is a squirming mass which kills or crowds out the worms. Actually, the maggots are also very good bait, but there is the yuk factor to consider, especially since some of my best fisherfolks are grandgirls.
5. About crowding: I have 16 grandchildren. In the winter, the worms are very crowded, but the rest of the year, I have to supplement their numbers from time to time. Today, when I added the Starbucks grounds, I found that the bottom half of the bucket was about half worms. They don’t seem to mind togetherness and are plenty fat and big. They must not secrete any sort of growth inhibiting factor.
6. Any major worm die offs? Well, a lot of them drown and a lot end up as fish food, but not otherwise, except when I was learning how much to feed them and before I figured out how to keep fly larvae out.
7. What temperature seems to be best for growing these worms? Somewhere between 32 and 100 F. I don’t let the garage freeze because there are water pipes in there, but I don’t air condition it, either. I have been surprised to see that they seem to reproduce and grow in the winter as well as in the summer. This may not really be true, though, since they don’t get impaled on hooks as often in the winter.
8. Do you have to add moisture to the bucket and how often? Whenever it feels dry, I carefully measure out a splash or two.
9. Do you keep a lid on the bucket? I used to, but it didn’t accomplish anything. If it were outdoors, I would use a lid to keep the coons and possums out.
10. How long have you been doing this? About three years. Before that, I tried to raise them in the garden, but it didn’t work nearly as well. The coons dug them up, for one thing. Fire ants seemed to like to nest in the beds, for another.
11. Any photos to the operation? I am really, really honored that you would call it an operation. If I took a picture, it would be a photo of a bucket.

As you can see, this is not a high-intensity hobby. The greatest reward is dumping the dirt out in a pan and letting my citified grandchildren paw through it for worms. The little ones squeal. The girls make faces and noises, but they still like doing it–they are just keeping up appearances, I suspect. The boys begin to get stoical at about 6. And, I must admit that when I feel like it, I leave the fly rod in the corner and do a little worm fishing, myself.

I hope this was helpful and not TOO disappointing.
Lou

heronblu, all kidding aside, great posts and info. I know what you mean about storing the coffee grounds until you have enough. It seems to mold easily. My mother-in-law has always thrown coffee grounds, veggies, fruits etc. around her flowers and trees. Has beautiful camellia trees. All the soil is very loose and full of worms.

heronblu what a great idea and story. I think you need to go to the next step and get a worm box or use a small kid's plastic wading pool(with cover) and use the same process. If you put a few holes in the bottom of the bucket and put a piece of small mesh screen on the inside bottom of the bucket that will get rid of the extra water will allow for more o2 and decomposition in the soil. I have used dry oatmeal , corn meal or grits as added food.

Nothing like a worm farm or rocks to skip for making small kids smile!!

heronblu,

What a great post! With grandchildren and a kids pond ready for them this spring, I'm going to start a worm bucket myself. Your info on fire ants and other predators was also most helpful as I was considering starting one out by the kids pond. Hadn't thought about fire ants. Great post! Thanks.

I'll bet Bob could find a place in the mag. for a small instructional article on raising your own worms. How about it heronblu?

Thank you all for the kind remarks. I will add that I have tried mixing whole leaves into the buckets, but they just rot too slowly and make a mess when fooling with the soil. Ground leaves would be better, and well mulched ones would be just right, I would think. I once mixed in composted cow manure, but that didn’t seem to make them any happier, and the aroma is hard to remove from the hands after digging around in the stuff. The Queen of My Heart was not amused. Chemical fertilizer is a very bad idea. What they mostly need is sources of carbon, I think, and the fertilizer burns them. I do add eggshells which I have crumbled up in my hand so the worms will have some grit to help them grind up what they ingest.

Ewest mentioned using oatmeal, cornmeal, and grits. I have used cornmeal in the past, and it worked OK, but there is something about getting extra use out of what I would throw away (or Starbucks would pitch out) which I find appealing. As I understand it, the kind of worms I am raising mainly eat the fungi, etc. which grow in the substrate food, rather than the food itself, but this may be wrong.

One of the important questions Bill asked is what kind of worms I have. I am sure the red wigglers which don’t really need soil and can compost fairly fresh organic material would reproduce and grow faster, but they require more care, and I raise the things for fun, not to have a post-retirement job. The same holds for the holes in the bottom of the bucket and the screen which ewest was kind enough to mention. It sounds like a great idea, but the bucket would dry out faster and there would be that bit of extra time whenever I upended the bucket. Further, any water which drains would end up on the concrete in the garage, not likely to make me popular with She Who Rules and Hates Dirt. Since I quit the daily grind, I have become a full-time expert at avoiding complications around the house.

If Bob Lusk would like a short piece on bucket vermiculture (maybe pitched as a fun project for the younger fisherman around the house) I would be happy to oblige. I think, though, that I have said pretty much everything I know, thanks to Bill’s comprehensive questions. I sure do look forward to the magazine every month, and I really enjoy this forum. If I could give back one percent of what I take out of here, I would feel like a rich man.
Wormy Lou

Lou :

You have given back much and we thank you for taking the time to share the info and story. With a wife and 16 grandkids I would suggest that you are indeed rich beyond measure. Keep us posted on how things go.

heronblu, Thanks a lot for the detailed and enlightening posts. I may try this method which is why I asked so many questions.

Do I understand you correctly that you basically only use coffee grounds and the occassional egg shells to grow the worms?

Interesting concept that the worms are consuming fungi from the decomposing organic materials. Can you remember where you read or heard this information?. It was my understanding (although very limited) that earthworms ate mostly organic materials/particles. However I also assume that fungi are living on small organic particles in soils. Thus the worms get both as they injest the orgfanics. Someone may be able to find more info on this topic by searching the web sources.

I think a big key to your success is the type or species of worm that is thriving in your cultures. I have redworms growing in our compost pile. The reason I asked for a picture is to see if I could recognize what type of worm you were using. I am not a worm expert, but I think garden worms may be a different species than leaf worms. There are likely several if not numerous species of worms that live in soil conditions. Choosing the wrong species of worm may lead to poor success.

Proper dampnesss in the bucket may also play an important part in your success. Another key to your success may be the frequency of dumping and refilling the culture buckets. This process enriches and infuses the air throughout the soil especialy the bottom of the bucket. Worms need air to thrive and too damp of conditons depleates their air supply.

I also like the idea for the article in Pond Boss magazine because there are many readers of the magazine who do not frequent this forum and the mini-worm farm idea would be new to them. If you do an article include a photo of a handfull of worms and a close up photo of a worm or two. A photo of the kids digging through the worms would provide interest to the story.

Thanks for sharing your information. Many of us are worm anglers. I am slowly working on an article for PBoss magazine about using worm angling to check the overall quality of a pond fishery. Worms can be a very good and useful bait.

I've had 2 worm farms. I once read an article titled "Let a worm be your garbage disposal". The first was a great success. I used an old metal GI metal closet. I mixed the topsoil with peat moss but don't remember the ratio. The peat moss was for water retention. I paid $5 for a 1/2 gallon milk carton full of worms, dirt, eggs, etc. The guy just scooped them up and assured me that there were 1,00 worms in there. I was doubtful but took them. I fed them coffee grounds, corn meal and newspaper. I really only fed them occasionally. I laid the newspapers on top of the bed and moistened them. The worms ate them. I had zillions of worms. On humid days, worms crawled out and went everywhere. I finally sold the whole works.

The second time was very recently and was a disaster. I raise dwarf banana trees in large 1/2 plastic barrels in my back yard, compliments of Bob Koerber who occasionally posts here. I sometimes put cow manure in for fertilizer and decided to toss some worms in that I bought at a bait store. I occasionally put coffee grounds on top for the worms. I had bunches of worms. The problem is that sugar ants (I guess) found the coffee grounds and moved in. Since I bring the trees in for the winter, I had to take the trees out and transplant them. Ants were everywhere and not a worm left alive.

Bill, I am sure that good answers depend on good questions, and I sure appreciate your questions, just as I tend to look for your name in PondBoss discussions because I rely on your ability to give information, in turn. To address a few:
1. I assume that I am raising the common garden worm, maybe Helodrilus caliginosus. I think this because the biggest generally run about 2-3 inches long, tend to be shades of brown without much, if any, red, live in soil rather than bedding, tend to be plumper and “squishier” than red worms, and seem happiest in the deepest soil in the bucket.
2: It is true that I have recently (pre-Starbucks) been supplementing the coffee grounds with organic material high in cellulose and/or lignin, i.e., newspaper scraps, ripped up tea bags, peels and husks (briefly microwaved to kill fruitfly eggs, stale bread crumbled in my hand, etc. But, now that I can get enough grounds at no cost, I probably will forgo fooling with the other stuff, except the egg shells. I never use meat or other products which might putrefy.
3. I cannot recall where I got the idea that the worms mostly digested fungi and bacteria growing on the organic material rather than getting most of their nutrients from the decomposing higher life directly. As I mentioned earlier, it may be wrong, but it just feels right, I suppose.
4. I also think that an occasional dumping is a good idea. I break up clods which form when I do so, and the soil is always several inches deeper when returned to the container. I assume that air spaces account for this, and it feels right to have loose soil for them to crawl around in. Also, food and water are more evenly distributed. On the other hand, I wonder if egg cases and the smallest worms aren’t disturbed and damaged by this. I keep handling them to a minimum.
5. I want to throw in that keeping common cheap cotton or other garden gloves next to the bucket is a great idea. When I forget them, I have to keep my hands in my pockets for a few days, as even the most careful cleaning won’t get out all the dirt deep under nails. Also, I have had an occasional subungual (under the nail) infection from driving foreign particles deep into the nail bed when I try to use my bare hands as shovels.

I have learned a great deal from these questions. Some of it was stuff I knew but didn’t know I knew and some I looked up. Thanks, again, Bill, and I look forward to your article on worm-fishing as a q.c. method.
Lou

A quick Google search on "raising worms" yields hundreds of sources of info, breeder worms, and more.

Frank

Frank, you are, of course, absolutely right. Almost all of these are for red wigglers, which are more persnickerty as to their tempature requirements, etc., and can apparently digest complex organic material directly. If I were going for a commercial operation, I would certainly choose red wigglers over garden worms. However, since I retired, anything resembling a work routene gives me the kind of heartburn that can be cured only by a morning on the pond.

I would suppose that all worms are equally "meat" to bluegill, but has anyone done any sort of decently controlled study on what kinds of worms fish like better or if the diet of the worms makes any difference in attracting the little "pond sharks" to them? (I call them pond sharks because they seem to think nothing is too big to be considered food for those tiny mouths, sometimes.)
Lou, 13.5 ac

This is an update on the "worm bucket." Grandchildren swarmed all over the place, yesterday, and I dug into my worm farm for bait. We caught some whoppers and my son said my favorite words, words I have heard a lot from various guests this year, "These are the biggest bluegill I have ever seen."

I had forgotten one of my buckets in a corner, and when I checked it yesterday, it had smaller numbers of worms, but they were larger than in the other container. There were no recently hatched worms, so I suppose they had quit reproducing.

The only things special about this bucket are that (since I forgot it was there) I haven’t added any coffee grounds since March and haven’t disturbed them in any other way. Survival of the fattest?

I did add a new supply of freebee spent coffee grounds to it, today, and will see what happens. As usual, I held out 4-6" of contents, mixed the grounds with the remainder, and added the reserved soil back. So far, that method has been 100% effective in preventing infestation by maggots.
Lou

This is one of the best threads I've ever read here on PB.

Lou, per your quote above, you have dissappointed me today.....you and I both know that your inspiration, recollections, and other idears originate from Mudcat Joe

just a small addition to a great thread . . .

An excellent article about raising worms can be found at:

http://plantanswers.tamu.edu/publications/worm/worm.html

I've been tending worms pretty much my whole life. As a kid on a farm near the shores of Lake Superior, I caught and sold lots of night crawlers. In the winter we kept them in "washtubs" in the basement and we fed them all the household coffee grounds.

In recent years I've mainly been using red wigglers since they are very hardy. They also reproduce very well. I started over this spring with a new bed using 4 dozen red wigglers from a local bait shop. My "farm" is a Rubbermaid container about 18 x 18 x 24 inches, with a bunch of 1/2-inch holes drilled in the side and bottom.

The 4 dozen worms have become several thousand, which have been spilt out to friends and to a couple of mulch piles. They get all of our kitchen vegetable and fruit scraps, plus our coffee grounds, coffee filters, and tea bags. The seem to be a very happy lot.

Happy fishn,

Ken

I started raising European Night Crawlers. I oredered a bunch and set them in there new homes.. Lo and behold the next morning they were all over the garage but someone forgot to tell me to leave the light on for the first few nights. Anyway since then they have been doing great. I have many many babys. All I started with was peat moss and one small wooden box maybe 1 1/2 by 1 and now I have this rich soil and 2 boxes full of worms. Mine eat everything from the coffee grinds to vegtables to paper, you pretty much name it and they eat it. I dont put meat in there. The cardboard egg creat holders you buy the eggs in are great the worm love them. These euro worms are uni sex or something they just lay eggs all the time. I got plenty of worms to fish with, heck I get enough to feed the fish once in a while and there no bother at all, they never crawl out now and add food once in a while and water and thats it. These worms tolarate pretty low temps and pretty high temps to. There about twice as big as the red wigglers and more resemble a night crawler but smaller with a nice tough hide.

I'm in my first year of worm "farming" growing red wigglers in a store bought setup called "wormtopia". The setup is easy to use and produces nice casings from the lower trays while the worms work their way up to the newer scraps. This setup allows for worm production as well as casing production. My fish aren't complaining. Now that it's getting cold up here I'm ready to bring the farm into the basement but it's full of fruit flys. Anyone ever experienced this? Am I doing something wrong? Any suggestions?

I got a lot of bugs to. I asked the guy who I got my worms from and there is a pestiside that is safe to use but I never wrote it down. I actually just culled my worms today. Taking all the big ones in one bin and baby worms in the other, then added a little new peat. I almost went with the red wigglers but these eropean night crawlers are really good. There kinda like the red wiggler but bigger and a much stonger hide. I may call the guy tomarrow because I cant leave my worms out either, there goos down to 40 ish but it get a little colder in mid winter here. I have to get rid of the bugs. One thing I do know is he told me to bury the scraps or I will get fruit flys, I bury it but I still get them, maybe from the bannana peals.