This makes more sense when hanging rabbit cages over worm bins, first since the ammonia chases worms away from some areas and secondly the hard outer shell of rabbit manure is actually only penetrable by the smaller worms .

What actually occurs is the smaller newly hatched worms of a 1/16^th of an inch or smaller penetrate the rabbit manure’s harder outer shell by slithering into crevices of the manure and begin to break down the individual pieces of manure. The larger worms congregate to feed on the scraps once the little worms have broken down the manure to mouth size particles for the larger ones, hence making them more of a parasite in these situations.

At the same time this made more sense to those offering worms raised under rabbit cages since they offer smaller worms. I know of one company for which offers 1 pound of African Nightcrawlers which run 1,000-1,200 worms per pound. In essence red wigglers run 800 to 1,000 per pound making the African’s they sell even smaller than red wigglers. This is because of two reasons, first being the small worms have access to more readily available feed. Secondly over time, a worm bin under rabbit cages will usually become crowded with small worms hence stunting there growth until they are thinned out and given time to grow.

The reason I began to get hooked on the rabbit manure is the fact that dried rabbit manure contains 20% crude protein, is pH neutral and is a source for numerous minerals…

I have tried shredding rabbit manure from under the cages, however ran into a main issue with the ammonia and how it reacts with the shredded manure. The solution was to build a separator which would enable me to harvest clean rabbit manure while allowing the urine to run outside the building.

Rabbit Manure Separator

Even though rabbit manure is considered cold manure, once shredded it will heat up to approximately 100 degrees Fahrenheit if piled 5” high over a 3 to 4 day period. The higher the pile the warmer the manure gets. By limiting the heat to 97-100 degrees I allow for the desired microbes to flourish.

After 5 to 7 days the material has lowered back down to 85 degrees give or take and actually has a fresh earthy smell to it even though it still looks like shredded rabbit manure with a little lighter coloring to it. This is when I have fed to the worms covering the beds with 1” or more of the feed.

Shredded Rabbit Manure

The worms will migrate and live while devouring this food material and growing faster. At the same time since they are eating so much food at this rate, the accumulation of worm castings sped up dramatically.

Worms Living in Shredded Rabbit Manure

I have played with one additional step to this method which has even sped up the worm’s growth that much more, however am still working out the details.

In this part of the series I am going to discuss two different fallacies most websites and even manufacturers will state are the golden rules when raising worms.

1. Stir or not to stir your worm bin.

2. The correct way to judge how many worms to place in your worm bin.

Many websites state you should turn your worm bedding once or twice a week. Heck even the directions from Purina Worm Chow state twice a week. Before I go into the reasoning of why not to turn your worm bin when raising worms allow me to take you back to nature once again to a wooded area where worms are thriving.

In natural setting worms are left alone to go about their business. There are no giant hands reaching down from the heavens turning the material they are thriving in. As most learn early on when trying worm composting for the first time, unlike regular composting one does not need to turn the material as the worms burrow through it aerating it as the consume it.

Some will say it doesn’t really matter however it does. When you turn the bedding material in your worm bin, the worms will stop eating and reproducing for up to 24 to 48 hours. If they stop performing their everyday task something has upset them whether it be your pH is off, bedding is too dry or wet or you turned the bedding!

One can better see the results of turning the bedding material if they are top feeding. Notice there is much more food left behind the following day or so…

Another fallacy which I am guilty of too since it was the way I learned, was to figure how many worms to place in a worm bin based on cubic footage and worms by the pound.

First let me show you how a pound of worms can differ greatly. I can take a pound of African nightcrawlers when they are about one month old which will roughly run about 1,000 to 1,200 worms.

When we sell the eight month old African nightcrawlers they run about 200 per pound and I have even grown some out larger running about 175 per pound.

Now if I were to take a pound of the 1 month old African nightcrawlers (1,000 +) and place in as other websites (an myself until recently) in one cubic foot of bedding material, the worms will never grow out to their potential… not even close to it. Being the worms will be crowded, they will remain stunted until such a time they are thinned out to the required room each worm needs.

Just the other week I noticed that a bed outside of Alabama Jumpers was not performing well. None were dying however they were not growing. They were consuming all the food every few days however it was jammed packed with worms. I decided a week and a half ago to expand the size of the bed and began feeding the entire larger bedding area. A week and a half later I looked and all the small worms were gone… Not really however in that short period of time they had literally all spread out and were thinned but had tripled in size! Now keep in mind with my studies of the worms, I have setup which is probably a near perfect environment for them as well as some of the food I am using which is something I will not go into as it can and will kill off a good number if not all your worms if not done correctly.

Going back in time to the early 1900’s utilizing some books on my shelves and some records I was able to look up the other day, based on some of the richest known soils in the U.S. back then per square acre, I was able to perform some quick calculations and come to realize that is was approximately only 133 earthworms per cubic foot of soil. This is roughly the number of worms in an almost perfect environment for the earthworms in which they themselves setup as the allotted room they need in their natural surroundings. Now keep in mind the types of specific worms were not listed just the term earthworms which differ from composting worms such as red wigglers.

How many times have you dug a shovel load of soil from a rich garden bed and had 300 to 400 worms per shovel load?

Now to be honest with you I cannot take all the credit here as there is a person named George in Australia that hooked up with me some time ago as he was raising Alabama Jumpers and other worms in a controlled environment and seen I was doing the same. However George is way ahead of me and has given me some insight to raising the jumpers and other worms… one being the breaking down the number of worms per cubic foot. If you live in Australia and looking to order some worms, please do visit his site.

Now going back to the rough number I came up with of 133 worms per cubic foot is perhaps a little low for some worms and not too far off for some others.

Rather than thinking of one pound of any size worms per cubic foot think outside the box. A way to grow some larger worms faster would be to think of one pound of fully grown worms per cubic foot of bedding material. To give you a little insight, most red wigglers are sold bed run in counts of 800 to a 1,000. However when fully grown, there are right about 500 red wigglers to a pound, hence 500 to a cubic foot of bedding material or one pound of bed run red wigglers to 2 cubic feet of bedding material.

So whether looking for larger and faster growing worms for fishing or composting, keeping in mind the larger the worms, the more material each worm can consume per day, begin thinning your worms to benefit even more. Figure on how many fully grown worms to a pound per cubic foot of bedding material to benefit even more.

Rather than give you my personal input which goes along with what I am about to reveal in this article I am going to post facts along with their associated sources as well as test results with pictures from my own garden and worm tea brew.

Now suppliers that sell worm castings, also known as vermicast (not to be confused with vermicompost which is some unprocessed organic matter mixed with worm castings) agree that worm castings offer great benefits to the soil, plants and root growth. They all also agree they are loaded with aerobic microbes (microscopic aerobic bacteria, fungi…). They basically all agree they should have a fresh earth smell to them similar to top soil, hence, no need to go any further trying to prove these points since all are in agreement.

Going back to the origin and history of the word aerobic:

“living only in the presence of oxygen,” 1884, (after Fr. aérobie,  coined 1863 by Louis Pasteur) from Gk. aero-  ”air” (combining form) + bios  ”life”

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper

Modern day definition of the word aerobic:

: living, active, or occurring only in the presence of oxygen

Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The list goes on, however for the point of this article I believe you get the point… Only in the presence of oxygen!

So now we know that worm castings are loaded with beneficial aerobic microbes for our plants whether indoor or outdoor.

Now being we cannot see individual aerobic microbes without the use of a good quality microscope, let me use an example which you can picture.

A goldfish is aerobic and requires oxygen to survive. Let’s say that you go to the local county fair and win a goldfish which they hand to you in a plastic bag half filled with water and half filled with air. You go home and place the goldfish on the mantle for the time being until you get the time to acquire a fish tank for the little guy.

For the next few days on your way downstairs in the morning you have a glance over at the mantle and the little guy is doing well… perhaps this weekend you will get him a fish tank…

About the fourth day you come downstairs and the goldfish is now belly up floating in the bag because it ran out of oxygen

So what do you think happens when you seal worm castings loaded with aerobic microbes in a bag just like the goldfish?

OK, some will tell you they just go dormant and when introduced to oxygen again they wake up. OK so we open the bag with the goldfish up and introduce oxygen again and sit back and wait… and wait… You get the picture.

Now to be perfectly honest there are literally a few, three that I have heard of, aerobic microbes that can go dormant for a while and become active with the reintroduction of oxygen. This is out of thousands upon thousands of known microbes… I am not even sure if any of the three will exist in worm castings. So in essence, the microbes in worm castings die.

In fact those that sell worm castings state it has a fresh earthy smell to it, however if you purchase a sealed bag of castings from a store shelf or online, open it… there is no smell at all or may even contain a foul smell.  The fact is all the beneficial aerobic microbes are dead just like the goldfish from above.

To prove this further, I went ahead and planted four types of seed in my garden divided into two categories. One with fresh worm castings from Organic Worm Farm, the others from a major brand name company ( I will not mention the name of the company here as I am not trying to give a bad name to anyone but rather explain the reasoning behind why sealed bags of worm castings are useless). At the same time, I know someone that supplies their worm castings to the company that sells this brand in a sealed bag. The personal worm castings produced by this individual are every bit as good as the one’s produced on Organic Worm Farm when shipped out to the processing company that bags them. In short it is not the quality of the worm castings which comes into play here and why I chose this particular brand of worm castings sold in a sealed bag.

The results were astounding to say the least from germination time required to the current growth rates. I am writing this article now as I took pictures yesterday before I went out and sprayed and watered all the plants with fresh brewed worm tea hence spoiling the experiment from this point forward.

Before I go on, be aware all the seeds planted in the pictures below received the same growing medium with the exception of bagged versus fresh worm castings, same amount of water, sunlight…

Here in the first picture are some Fennel seed plants. For those unfamiliar with fennel, it is an Italian seasoning found in real Italian sausage…  :-) The fennel plant on the left was planted with the sealed bag of worm castings while the one on the right with fresh worm castings.

Fennel Seed Plants

The next picture is of two Roma tomato plants. Again the one on the left lower corner was planted using worm castings from a sealed bag while the one on the right using fresh castings.

Roma Tomato Plants & Worm Castings

This next picture depicts Ruby Red Swiss Chard with the plant on the right using the sealed bag of worm castings and the one on the left using the fresh.

Comparing Worm Castings on Swiss Chard

This next photo is straight neck summer squash. Again, the one on the left used the sealed castings while the one on the right used fresh.

Worm Castings Comparison on Summer Squash

Now this brings me to the brewed worm tea section of this article. First let me say that if you have one of the stackable worm farm systems with the spigot on the bottom, what comes out of there is not worm tea which you will better understand if you read a previous article I wrote some time ago, the Difference Between Worm Tea and Leachate .

Allow me to take a moment and explain the reasoning behind worm tea. When one brews a worm tea properly, correct temperature, aeration, food sources, they are exponentially exploding the beneficial aerobic bacteria population while at the same time not increasing the population of beneficial aerobic fungi but rather allowing them to grow in size. In short, you are generating more, larger and healthier aerobic microbes to feed your soil and plants with.

So what happens when you brew worm tea from worm castings which come from a sealed bag? Well I thought this would be another good part to this experiment so after I brewed a batch from fresh worm castings I decided to start another batch from the ones I purchased in a sealed bag.

The first picture depicts the worm tea brewed with fresh worm castings from Organic Worm Farm. You can notice the transparency of the bubbles commonly referred to as froth in the brew. This is exactly what you are looking for.

Froth That Develops When Brewing Worm Tea

Here in the next photo I even went a further step as the night before, even though the sealed bag of worm castings did not have an odor, the worm tea brew had an anaerobic smell, basically a foul smell to it.  It also had a brown colored froth something I have only seen before when one is brewing and explodes the aerobic microbe count and does not add additional food hence end up killing some of the aerobic microbes creating the brownish froth. I added extra food to the tea. By morning this still was a brown froth.

Worm Tea Depicting Brown Froth

Next I added fresh worm castings to the mix and a few hours later, bam, we had transparent froth developing in the brew, hence the clear bubbles towards the center while the brown froth still remained towards the outer edges. The foul smell was gone and it smelled sweat as it should.

Now while many parts of the country are inundated with rains and flooding, here in the southeast we are dry and hot. The manure pile at times has dried out so much; the worms could not be found in the manure itself but rather moved into the ground under the pile which helps to retain a little moisture there.

Getting to my point here, if you look at worms in the ground, there are no holes in the bottom for air to pass through as many, including myself (which I still smack the back of my head from time to time for doing so) state you need air holes on the bottom of your worm bins when raising worms. Others will say it is for water to drain through or both.

Here is what I did. I setup two identical buckets without any holes on the bottom, however numerous air holes around the top as well as set them in a well ventilated area.

Raising Worms

I placed enough moisture and food mixture in both to sustain ½ pound of red wigglers in each. They both contained 2.5 gallons of bedding / food mixture.

The only difference was the bedding material by which one was sphagnum peat moss while the other contained coconut coir, one which has been aged for at least 18 months and rinsed completely.

Red Wigglers In Peat Moss

After 30 days I opened the two buckets screened the materials and found just about ¾ of a pound of worms in each. This was not due to additional worms but rather the increased size of the worms and their individual weights.

While both appeared at first to work the same, I found the coconut coir had a smell, started turning anaerobic in the bottom half of the bucket while the bucket containing the peat moss smelled like fresh earth throughout. The issue came down to the coconut coir not holding water as well and draining so that the bottom was much moister than the top.

The other difference in this setup was that there was right about a 10% higher cocoon rate in the peat moss bucket.

These were just a couple things we noticed, however onto the reason for this article again.

The worms not only fared well without any holes for aeration but grew in size, hence a happy environment for them.

I then proceeded to build a new stack unit; this permits me to hold a good number of worms for breeding, hatching and growing worms in less square footage of floor area. The bins, which are small, cement mixing tubs which when filled to an inch from the top, give me right about 1 cubic foot of bedding and food materials. None of the bins have any holes drilled on the bottom.

Worm Farm

Now we have used these for going on two months now with all four types of worms we raise here, red wigglers, African nightcrawlers, European nightcrawlers and Alabama Jumpers, hence why the different color tags on each.

From growing, breeding, hatching and using as holding bins, there have not been any issues.

It appears the worms, just as in the case of the manure pile when it is moist, thrive very well, theoretically perhaps due to the increased aeration over the open bedding surface. By placing a piece of burlap over the top of the bedding and keeping it damp helps to keep the top from drying as quickly while still allowing good breath ability for the worms.

In short, unless you are over watering or feeding a load of vegetable scraps such as melons releasing lots of moisture, worms do not need holes on the bottom of their worm bins and actually appear to grow faster when in a more natural environment, allowing the bottom to stay moist and only needing a little spray of water on top.

I will be writing about other facts we have found in our tests the past several months including a way to assist in preventing many pests from either inhabiting your worm bin or at least keeping the numbers under control so as they do not get out of control!

The original worm harvester was running a motor of 3,500 RPM’s which I modified for additional vibration, when I noticed a pile of small fragments in the light. Upon taking the motor apart I had found the shaft was wearing down. Hence with the speed of the motor, this could eventually lead to a serious health hazard!

Since so many have been emailing asking for the worm harvester plans, I decided to build one based off a manual design I built for a local couple here in South Carolina which would be much safer.

The new design encompasses a trommel style which still utilizes two different screen sizes for my purposes. It runs smooth and is much quieter than the shaker style worm harvester.

Another benefit to the newer model is the fact it is simpler to build and does not require some higher end tools to be used during the build process.

This model can be used to harvest worms and worm castings as well as a compost sifter for your garden soil mixes.

I am currently working on the plans for this new model and will have them available very soon. Sign up for the Worm Composting Newsletter if you are not already since I will be announcing in there as soon as I have finished them up.

The video below illustrates some of the basics to the worm harvester. It is also broken down to show how the machine will screen composted materials and sift down the different sized materials. The last part shows how the harvester will harvest worms, cocoons and worm castings into different bins.

Enjoy,

Bruce

The result was that the red wigglers avoided the computer paper side of the bin like the black plague. I decided to fool around with this experiment further by taking bunches of the shredded computer paper and moving it to where the worms has settled in comfortably within the worm bin. This actually chased the worms away from these areas to other areas of the worm bin.

Unlike years ago when households relied mainly on well water, today most homes depend on local municipalities and utility companies for their drinking eater. It is suppose to be better water which could be correct due to contamination of thousands of wells across the country.

In order to be sure that our tap water is free of any unwanted bacteria, the water treatment companies add chloride to our drinking water.

This is when it hit me when a number of people have had problems with worms trying to escape and they state their pH, moisture and temperature levels are all correct. There was a common denominator here; they all used tap water straight from the faucet.

The tap water can actually have more chloride than the residue left behind during production of computer paper.

So how does one resolve this issue? It is actually pretty simple and does not cost anything.

First I have seen where some people state that you simply aerate the water to remove chlorine. This will NOT work!

Anyone with a pool can relate to the consumption rate of chlorine on sunny days compared to overcast days. This is because the chlorine is broken down under the influence of the UV radiation in sunlight.

One of the simplest ways to remove chlorine from your tap water for your worm bin and garden areas using worm castings since they too consist of bacteria and fungi is to set a bucket of water out in direct sunlight for a day or two.

Another way to obtain chlorine free water is to collect rain water. One problem with rain water can be the impurities within the air that are washed out when it first begins to rain. These impurities can be harmful to your worms especially if you live near a factory for example putting out a lot of smoke or other atmospheric pollutants.

Another way to obtain chlorine free water is to purchase a gallon jug of natural spring water. Just be sure they have not added chlorides to help preserve the shelf life. For the average worm bin, a one dollar jug of water can go a long way!

A last note, if you are trying to produce the best possible worm castings, the chlorides will kill off a majority of the beneficial microbes you want. When watering plants using the worm castings, always use chloride free water otherwise you are defeating the purpose.

Good Luck in Your Worm Composting & Gardening Adventure…

Bruce Galle