I did not know they did not like the environment because they did not try to escape. I keep an eye on the worm bin everyday to make sure the environment was to the worms liking? I use newspaper, egg shells, coffee grounds, and some compost. If anyone needs a larger number of wigglers on an acreage with manure to compost, I have a good population in a cow manure pile by late June thru August most years.
No livestock on farm so there are no stable flies laying on my piles. Got our worms a couple days ago and they are already going crazy laying eggs. This has been awesome for my kids to experience while home from school. I have had my worm farm for about 3 weeks. I live in Texas and my hungry bin is on my carport that is shaded all the time but does get pretty hot. The food scraps I have fed the worms seem to be sprouting and this morning I noticed that I think there are small white maggots on the lid of the bin.
Could this be? I have fed them potatoes, tomato pieces,eggplant pieces mostly. I would like to ask what I should be doing? Skip the acidic fruit and vegetables like tomatoes and citrus fruit. Bring them in the house. If your bin is right, it should be near odorless to slightly earthy. My two bins are in my office. As for other creatures, this is inevitable. I freeze my scraps to help kill any bug eggs or large, then throw it in.
Sometimes I put the frozen blob in the corner and the worms move away. You said nothing about bedding. Your bin should be mostly shredded non-glossy newsprint and ripped up pieces of cardboard.
Last, leave them alone! The less you mix the bin, the happier they are. And btw, my worms have no trouble with citrus peels. Occasionally I will re-screen it to harvest those worms and get them back into the work bin. Hello Ken! Depending on which worms you have, Red Wigglers, European Night Crawlers or another, the size can differ. I am assuming that you have the Red Wigglers.
At full maturity, our Red Wigglers will be about inches. How can I deter pests in my worm composter? Also if I bring my worm composter inside like in my basement, will it attract mice and rats?
The best advise it to make sure you do not overfeed the worms and keep the food covered. You do not want a lot of decomposing excess food smelling up the bin and basement; that will surely draw anything in search of a free meal.
Feed the worms every days or when the previous food is almost gone. Collect Worm Castings the Easy Way. How to Compost Acorns. All Camping Places to Go Rockhounding. Tourmaline Hunting. All Kid Gardening Ideas. Helicopter Gardening. Take a gander at this close-up of a red worm cocoon — looks like a miniature lemon. These little baby sacks are fascinating! Summary of How Worms Reproduce: A red worm has both male and female reproductive organs.
Two worms get together. They exchange sperm and egg cells through a band-like area of the back end of the body called a clitellum. The clitellum secretes mucus to make the egg case or cocoon, protecting the sperm and eggs.
The sperm in the cocoon fertilize the eggs and when ready, the end of the cocoon seals up as the cocoon slips off the worm into the bedding or soil. The eggs incubate for about 3 weeks before hatching.
On average, worms usually hatch out of each cocoon. European Nightcrawlers and red wigglers CAN coexist. Tolerant of similar conditions, these two work side by side without much fuss. Searched worm eggs and found this site. This year I cleaned out the alley myself moving the plastic bags with a gentle hand hundreds and hundreds of worms.
I grabbed a shovel plus two 5 gallon buckets. Filled the two up plus two bags with black gold and worms. I now have a thriving worm farm been feeding them for a month now.
Hi Timothy. Nice save, by the way! Hi Francesa, Happy is an understatement. They are for sure red wigglers they been doing their thing forever since I own the house.
I live in the city of Philadelphia my yard is the end of the alley. Weeds, elephant plants and whatever grew back there would be the worm food, when the winter was coming I was stepping on them its easy to clean them up which I never did. I had a giant building behind my house that belongs to the National Guard called the Army that building blocked all my sun.
Sad to say they torn that building I guess I can say its good for me so I got back into gardening. The plastic bags worked the same way as leaves holding in moisture to give them the environment they did. Living in an apartment with a narrow balcony. Few days ago I received my order of worm casting about 5kg. Need your expert advise. Can I mix them with my old normal soil? How do I make the tea casting mix as im a beginner? Really hope you can help me out with this.
Eagerly waiting for your reply n anxiously looking forward to start my own mini garden. At least I can have my very own vegetables n herbs to use.
Thank you very much for your time. God bless. Hi Rahmah! And WOW, you got a lot of worms! You are definitely able to make a lot happen with that many.
Yes, you can mix them into your normal soil. Also, you need to be aware of their limits- temps and so forth. Do you know for certain what type of worm you have? Red wigglers, Eisenia fetida? Other earthworms? Before you know it- your garden and worm composting hobbies will have you busy growing, harvesting, and eating!
If you want to help them avoid going down under, you can lay a sheet of newspaper along the bottom tray. It will allow moisture through, but will keep the worms up top. Hi Francesca! I decided to go super small with an indoor worm farm because my compost outside gets way too hot for Red Wigglers here in AZ. I think I have jumped the gun a little bit and I may have harvested my castings too soon.
There are hundreds of cocoons in my harvested castings and I have already sorted all the worms out of it. I started with worms and used a coconut coir bedding and only fed them every week 5 times since inception. The original bedding tray was packed full and very densely compacted. I was worried about them not being able to breath and being stuck in their poop which I read was toxic , so I decided to remove some of the castings.
There were only a few worms in the bottom bin the bedding and they were either laying eggs or mating, cause there was no food left for them to eat down there and about a dozen had slipped down into the tea bin which had almost no liquid.
I know I am doing something wrong…what should I do with all these cocoons? Can I put them in a bin of their own and hope they hatch? Or do they need to go back in to the general population? Which tray do I put them back into? Thank you and any other contributors in advance for your input! I must have gotten a ton of cocoons with my worms, because there are babies to Fat long guys in there and at least double or triple the amount I had a month ago.
First of all, you can totally relax. It sounds like everything is going really well. Compost harvested early will still be full of nutrients and give your garden a boost. You can certainly put them into their own bin to hatch. Through the moist tunnels of their confines, they absorb oxygen right through their skin. They can essentially pull it right from their bedding. Fresh air is always good to offer though.
The decomposition process creates co2 that is good to let out and replace with some clean oxygen. Just opening the lid and waving a bit is all you need to do. Every day or few days is even okay for that. As we separate them out, does light harm the cocoons and developing worms in the way it can paralyze the other worms, or is it okay to have the cocoon exposed to light for a prolonged period while the sorting is going on?
The cocoons will be put into a separate bin as a hatchery. Thanks for your help! Mature worms are very sensitive to light and the same goes with the cocoons.
You will want to make sure that the cocoons are not exposed to the light for more than 30 minutes at most. Thank you so much for publishing this information!
I looked at a lot of sites that said the small balls were fertilizer. At first there was only year old scraps, kept in a large bin and practically liquified. This went into the tunnel, like toxic waste. At first, nothing. Then I added dirt with some aged horse manure and cornstarch packing peanuts.
Within a week, worms. My other in-ground worm tunnel, with fresh scraps, is full of black soldier fly pupae. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Which is more bizarre? Mature red wiggler worms slide their cocoons off their heads. OR The worms inside a cocoon can survive being frozen. Little Golden Gifts First things first. An Inside Look As I sat there picking delicate cocoons from my first sifted harvest of worm compost, I noticed one seem to shake.
The Cocoon What I learned surprised me. The Incubation Station A freshly deposited red wiggler cocoon may contain as many as 20 eggs. When Worms Emerge As temperatures rise and moisture returns to the soil, life springs back into action. Preparing for Your New Arrivals Compost worms are some of the greatest pets because of how little they require in terms of hands-on care.
Predicting Population Growth For every healthy worm bin, there will be countless cocoons being formed, filled, and hatched at any one time. Happy worm composting! Tagged With beginners reproduction. Readers Comments 35 Elaine Robin October 25, pm.
Francesca November 6, pm. Vicky March 2, pm.
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