worm farms

You may be thinking right now that you are quite possibly the only person interested in such a topic, but you are far wrong my friend! Many people just like you are taking up worm farming, and mainly for the same reasons.

Starting a worm farm is great for your own backyard environment, and its a great way for anyone to help maintain their little portion of the ecosystem. If you are interested in gardening, or having vegetable hot beds, Vermiculture and those things go hand-in-hand.

Here's a quick story to illustrate why its so cool.

When I was a kid, we had 3 hotbeds for vegetables. We also had some of the best produce that you could imagine. All of my friend's parents also had vegetable gardens, and they used to show up with 5 gallon buckets to grab some of our soil. This soil was produced from horse manure that sat behind our barn in a big heap. It had been collecting their for several decades and it was so black, soft and rich that people were blown away at how well there gardens did after applying just a little bit.

You've seen what a really moist chocolate cake looks like, right? well that's exactly what soil of this caliber looks like, and not to sound weird, but it looks as delicious as chocolate cake!

But here's the other HUGE benefit of having your own worm farm. A lot of people live in more urban areas where they don't have as much access to conservation resources like we did on our farm.

We all end up with scraps like fruit peels, and general food particles, but a lot of them go to waste and just end up as smelly waste. The biggest benefit is this form of recycling...

Purchase $50 worth of food at a store, save the scraps, reinvest them into the earth and that 50 bucks becomes hundreds of dollars saved on growing a lot of your own food. Take that stuff, and just keep reinvesting and you'll do something good for the environment and save a ton of money.

A lot of people make fun of country folk, but at least they know how to survive, thrive, and save a pretty penny - and its fun!!!

The first thing that is very important is to build some sort of a worm bin or container. Now, you CAN build an indoor worm farm, but worms like the darkness, so what you need to do is wrap your container (if its see-through) in paper sheets to keep them happy.

The structure does not have to be massive, and in most cases will be fairly small. It should be at least one and a half feet wide, by 8 or so inches deep.

You will want to keep this in a room that you can shut off, because of the smell. The benefits of having one outside is that you won't have to deal with the smell coming from your worm farm, and you can develop a much larger container.

Now, what kind of worms should you use? There are lots, but you will probably find that earth worms or red worms, sometimes called red wigglers work really well.

By the way, if you want to catch your own, take a moistened piece of cardboard and lay it out in your lawn for over night. The worms will gravitate towards it because they love cardboard. The next morning you should have quite the batch!

To get the little guys started with the right bedding, take news papers (no colors) and shred them up for layer one. Then add a little water to moisten the papers. Add some egg shells. Don't add too much water or they will drown. It should be for oxygen purposes only. Start off with garden soil and then you can start adding scraps later.

Never fully close your container at the top with a lid, because they do need to breath just like us.

The other benefit of raising worms like these is that if you are really big on fishing then you have a nice surplus for bait. Plus, if you raise any kind of pets like amphibians then you can save money on pet food by feeding some of these worms to them.

Some people who just jump right in find themselves extremely disappointed. This is because although worm composting isn't rocket science, the art of Vermiculture is indeed a bit of a science. Anyone can learn this very quickly and start enjoying it, but without a little bit more knowledge, you may find your worms not performing up to their expectations, or even worse - dying.

Getting your ratios straight is important, and if your goal is to be able to use them for gardening, fishing, as pet food, or all three, then you need to learn how to get the most out of them.

Think about it, you want a good yield when its all said and done, if you don't take care of them properly you can kill them, or feed them to your pets in an unhealthy state and do damage to them as well.