# worm breeding



## mikemercer (Mar 7, 2009)

is there anyone that breeds worms i have picked up a few books and dived head first into this (i had 40 rhode island red chickens) and they required alot of food and worms are full of protein so just wondering if there is any here that breeds worms or is intrested


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 7, 2009)

I am breeding mealworms and superworms, is that what u ment? I love the Reds, I use to have them on my farm


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## mikemercer (Mar 8, 2009)

yes thats what i ment  (have any pic of your setup) i was thinking about raiseing earthworms because there bigger then the reds sinse there gonna be chicken food


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## mikemercer (Mar 8, 2009)

yes thats what i ment (have any pic of your setup) i was thinking about raiseing earthworms because there bigger then the reds sinse there gonna be chicken food


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 8, 2009)

not at the moment I don't and ask anyone here, I take poor pics :lol: , and don't believe a word they say!

Just keep them in a container big enough to move around in and use your good old worm food for them and they will do the rest, also give them sliced potatoes every other day or so, no fried eggs though, they just like their taters :lol:


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## mikemercer (Mar 9, 2009)

hibiscusmile said:


> not at the moment I don't and ask anyone here, I take poor pics :lol: , and don't believe a word they say!Just keep them in a container big enough to move around in and use your good old worm food for them and they will do the rest, also give them sliced potatoes every other day or so, no fried eggs though, they just like their taters :lol:


dont feel bad you saw the pic i took of the oothca pretty blurry

what do you use the worms for (just a hobby ?) or for feeding?

i have much data on worm breeding if your up for a conversation?


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 9, 2009)

dont mind chatgting at all,,justcant spell :lol: .

I use them for supplementing the mantis dinners, I LIKE TO give them a varietyu of food, I figured I would not finish fixing the spelling here, cause this laptop is possessed or something, course now it is gonna spell right since AI aha! I am telling on it. maybe it is just me. but as i was saying the mantis get them and customers buy them for feeders too. I don't like the way they squirm in a circle when aI grab them with the forcepts and AI don't like the way they grab onto things with their feet! makes me wince!


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## mikemercer (Mar 10, 2009)

hibiscusmile said:


> dont mind chatgting at all,,justcant spell :lol: .I use them for supplementing the mantis dinners, I LIKE TO give them a varietyu of food, I figured I would not finish fixing the spelling here, cause this laptop is possessed or something, course now it is gonna spell right since AI aha! I am telling on it. maybe it is just me. but as i was saying the mantis get them and customers buy them for feeders too. I don't like the way they squirm in a circle when aI grab them with the forcepts and AI don't like the way they grab onto things with their feet! makes me wince!


  all part of natures garden even the squirmy ones  i love worms because theyre not picky on food like you can feed them crushed eggshells and coffee grounds wich is usefull sinse we had alot of chickens and alot of eggshells and found it disturbing to feed the eggshell to the chicks for calcium so i planed on feeding them that

plus we have 80 head of cattle so beding for the worms is all free wich equals out to free food for the chickens

free is for me


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 10, 2009)

yum, I am coming over for a steer cookoff! So u don't feed the chickens the shells? What r u using for grit? I kinda miss raising rabbits, if I didn't clean regulary, I always had maggots galore under the cages!


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## mikemercer (Mar 10, 2009)

hibiscusmile said:


> yum, I am coming over for a steer cookoff! So u don't feed the chickens the shells? What r u using for grit? I kinda miss raising rabbits, if I didn't clean regulary, I always had maggots galore under the cages!


i feed them calcuim from the farm store plus they get extra from plants and bugs

free range chickens pick up small stones from drives ways to supplement for grit

(use saw dust if you mix sawdust in it dries it out faster and thus not sutable for breeding buggys


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## mikemercer (Mar 10, 2009)

mikemercer said:


> is there anyone that breeds worms i have picked up a few books and dived head first into this (i had 40 rhode island red chickens) and they required alot of food and worms are full of protein so just wondering if there is any here that breeds worms or is intrested


have you read *worms eat my garbage *by mary appelhof very good book id recomond it for anyone in any kinda worm busyness


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## nasty bugger (Mar 10, 2009)

I have red wigglers in my closet. thre tubs of them. They need the cool weather, and if you get much over 80 degrees they'll pretty much melt, and they you'll have no worms.

I just started my red wiggler cultures last october or november.

I too have the 'worms eat my garbage' book.

They love cantaloupe, and other mellons. They also seem to like coffee grounds. I heard they love carrots, but they don't seem to eat them very fast in my cultures. They also seem to leave the banana's way long, but the guy that sold me my first pound of them said they love banana's and carrot's, but they don't eat them like they do the melons.

I've put eggplant in also, and they eat it, some quickly, others not so fast.

I robbed the store up the road's dumpster for a box of apples they threw out, and they seem to have eaten them fairly quickly.

I also hit the dumpster behind a couple starbucks and got all the coffee grounds I needed. Found some wax paper bags full of coffee they were going to brew, but obviously didn't, and layered apples, then about half an inch of peat moss, then coffee grounds and fresh ground coffee, kinda, with strawberries and raspberries from the dumpster, and then apples, and peat, and coffee grounds and fruit etc. They got after that stuff pretty fast.

I actually had 2 18 gallon totes about three quarters full of worm work, and took about 25% of the worms out of each of the two and used them to start the third bin. I then did the other two bins like the third. I still have a bucket half full of coffee grounds for the next feeding  

The produce markets are best for finding a variety of food for the worms, though you have food that I don't. I do have some goat manure that I got from my cousin. I wet it and microwaved it in a free yard sale microwave oven, then let it cool and added it in with the apple, coffee, mix last time.

As to the manure, they say you should compost it first, or it will heat up the bin as it breaks down, and the heat is bad for the worms as they're pretty sensitive to that stuff.

I have shredded aspen bedding that is from my snake bin, mouse bins, and I am wondering if I should add that, or if there's too much ammonia from the urine from the mice in that, but I have yet to ask on a worm forum.

I have some meal worms, but my mantis' don't seem to go after it real aggresively. My mice and turtles seem to love the meal worms though. I feed them sparingly, as they seem to get a bit aggressive when I introduce the live prey.

The meal worms seem to keep well for a while in the fridge, so I kind of like them for live food for my other pets. I still need to try to let some warm up and grow into moths for the mantis'. I'm sure they'd like the moths much better than the worms, or at least have more interest in the movement of the moths.

I started with earthworms, red wigglers, to get a worm culture large enough to compost alot of soil for a garden I was hoping to have if I got a small ranch in the northern az area this summer.

I wanted to produce my own food, but the worms aren't quite producing like I'd hoped, but then I imagine if I had all the manure and stuff from the waste on a ranch that I'd have alot more food for them to eat and get busy after, alot larger area for them to live in get away from the waste they've produced also.

After so long they aren't as healthy living in their own feces and die off, so I may be reaching that in my older cultures.

This is why I started a new tub for them.


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## mikemercer (Mar 11, 2009)

nasty bugger haave you added lots of ventaltion for your worm bin some times if you add more theyll become more active and then breed more i thought of an idea of sticking a pvc pipe throw the center with holes drilled into it to addd air circulation throw the core and if you leave the manure spread out out side on a nice day it will start the heating process and be done with in two days (also if you go to an bakery and get day old bread or moldy and put a couple of peses on top of the ben they will eat the snot out of it something to do with the starch and yeast

(just a thought plz reply with thoughts and comments)


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## mikemercer (Mar 11, 2009)

also if you run most of the vegies and stuff throw a food processer theyll munch on it better takes less decomposing time


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 11, 2009)

All of those very good resources, I use to get the Mother Earth news and they had a lot of good articles on worms in them, and the veggie stands are also a good place to get your food, my dad used to talk to the produce people and they were glad to let him have the old veggies and such. Also sometimes if u can get a little hay and mix it in the compost bin, it helps arrierate it.


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## nasty bugger (Mar 12, 2009)

My worms do seem to enjoy the fruitfly culture material I put in the bins after I can them. I dig into the bin and I always find worms in the FF culture, in nowhere else in particular. May be the yeast, may be the well decomposed, and ever so tasty dregs from the culturing process.

I'm not going to big on aeration with pipes since the worms are in my closet, but I do have a fan with a carbon filter on it, and it is also a negative ion generator, to reduce any musty odor and to circulate air in there.

The goat manure I use has been in the goat pen for quite some time, and was stomped down into a rather hard cake basically. I dampen it and put some water in the container then into the microwave to steam and 'pasturize' so no secret uglies pop up and start messing with my worms health.

The 'goat cake'  has some alfalfa mixed with it since that's what the goats eat, with an occasional sweet feed.

If I get a ranch or some land, I will be composting en masse. I want to build troughs, if I go to a high elevation, and keep the worms down below the ground level and have compost heating on top to keep the worms warm enough to get through the winter well.

I will have them above ground in the summer, then push it into a trough in winter.

I'd like to experiment with the above mentioned technique with a small green house or cold frame and try growing cold weather crops and some leaf vegitables with the aid of some slight heat from the compost. I Have no idea how successful this would be.

Would be nice to grow some food to supplement the other animals, if I get them, maybe using hydroponics, and warm the hydro solution with a solar heater or run some line through a chamber in the wood stove, which they run alot where I went to high school at (I miss the smell of a good pinion or cedar or juniper, or oak wood burning in a wood stove in the crisp winter night air while walking the hillside ) I mention this cause an old buddy built his own wood stove with a chamber made of the left over vertical pipe that support the ski lifts at the ski resort, he built the lodges there, and added a rectangular chamber on top, over the pipe, that has heat routed into it through a side chute, and the rectangular chamber has tubing running through it to run water through to heat the water.

I figure if I could use this spaghetti tubing in through another chamber with water and use that water for the hydro solution, then I could also keep the worm and compost area warm and active with that warmer water/solution during the below freezing weather there.

Some say why bother, I hear Rick saying it right now, from somewhere in southeast US, a bumping of the molecules moving across the US, through tropospheric ducting no doubt  , just a vibe and I answer, cause I just want to have a good worm supply when spring rolls around to compost quickly and make the most of waste material I can drag in during the winter while I'm in town working. This will keep the culture active, I am speculating, and when spring and summer roll in, a massive explosion of activity and healthy soil to build a lighter soil from the heavy clay and sometimes rocky soil where I'm speculating on going.

The worms will serve a purpose in not only breaking down the waste to active and healthy soil amendments, but also aerate the soil, but I'll probably have to use a european nightcrawlers for the aeration process, as they are burrowers. Reds up top, and euro's for deeper aeration.

I'm going a bit off on a tangeant, but I'm dreaming up a worm culture, and hopefully a active and healthy self-sustaining polyculture that will get me through the new depression/recession  

I'm also wanting to experiment with using cool well water to circulate in the worm bins when it gets too warm, like it does here in phoenix, and after it warms try to set up some kind of cone with a venturi effect and put a water jacket around the coolest part of the neck of the venturi throat to recool the water.

This is all speculation from stuff I dreamed up while sitting in the library and out on hippy ranches while living in the middle of nowhere in the mountains when I was younger, but never got to implement these ideas.

I mention all this stuff cause being in Phoenix I have to develop a way to keep my worms, which do not survive much over 80 degrees, alive and thriving in a place that gets well over 100 degrees most of the year, with little rain during the hot season.

I lived in an area that had alot of mine shafts, horzontal as well as vertical, when I was young. We had dirt bikes and we'd ride hard in the hundred plus degree summer, and I'd feel dizzy and we'd just run up to a mine shaft and walk inside and it was instantly cool. Like 100+ to 60 degrees in ten or twenty feet  maybe more...  but I think about using that crude technology to cool my worms in this hot area.

Ground pipes that are cooled deep down and bring cooled air to the location it is needed.

Some would say that it's too much work, but where I lived you didn't have work all the time, and there was time to do these experiments, not to mention I like to make the most of natural 'resources' and then use other technologies to supplement that, not the other way around.

Ranchers, like you, may not have that kind of time though  I think that the intial intake temperature for the air, before it goes deep, would be critical, and that if there were bushes that had good moisture transpiration around the entry, and shaded, would keep the air from heating up the deep area of the pipes.

This may sound like alot for worms, but it's not just for worms, but they would be my canary in the gold mine for the initial experiment.

Shading the worm bins with solar panels in summer, and using misters to cool would also keep the worm area cool enough to thrive in summer, I hope, but here in the ol' apartment my options are really limited, so it's a couple bins in the closet of my air conditioned room.

I'd raise rabbits over the bins if I could, but I'm not quite that sophisticated yet..., but I am considering mice over the bins if it doesn't prove to be detrimental due to the amount of ammonia that the mice produce with their urine.

If I had the place outside I could raise the rabbits and other critters over the worm bins, and the fruit flies could come for the stuff on the top soil of the worm bin, and insects that eat the fruit flies could feast on them, then they in turn could produce manure, my mantis manure project (yes, it is a joke Rebecca) could fuse with the other critters manure to feed the worms, and keep the polyculture thriving.

Springtales could be cultured in the worm bin for very small mantis cultures and dendrobates, dart frogs, maybe.

Water from a fish or fresh water shrimp pond could keep the worms moist, While being sprayed up to cool the surrounding area through evaporation, and aid in the soil decomposition while adding nutrients. There is a fresh water shrimp farm between phoenix and yuma, at gila bend, so I know that can be down. I used to do work for the owner sometimes, a while back.

An old friend of mine was telling me of some experiments in africa where they would use a layer of salted water as a sort of magnifier, or something like that, to keep the water warmer underneath when it's cool, and they could raise the shrimp when it normally couldn't be done, and they were experimenting with using some pressure from this setup to make some minor energy. Just something I'd like to check out.

As you can tell, or not, my use of earthworms is actually geared toward a self sustaining polyculture. The insects are part of that for making good soil and pest control. Now if I can just get the place of my own to do this stuff

or maybe I'll just raise a cupful for fishin'.......  

As the older gentleman that came to be a friend of mine, that was the researcher and always had the answers when nobody else did, his name was Phil  , he would say to this post, "Blathery, nothing but Blathery"  

Just fishin' for ideas, with worms


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## mikemercer (Mar 12, 2009)

wooow thats alot of words  i think your defently on the right idea

you read alot of books ?

check out www.motherearthnews.com i think youll find it intresting


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 12, 2009)

yea, u lost me somewhere in the first sentence! :lol: Ok, I am gonna go lay down now, I used to dream of a worm farm, only thing is and I mean this, I can't stand the site of them! They make me weak :lol: so I went to something else! Wonderful creatures, but as a child they always made me walk on tiptoes when I saw them and of course cry if anyone pretended to throw one at me, and really if I just saw someone pick one up I felt threatened,,, didn't stop me from dreaming though.


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## The_Asa (Mar 12, 2009)

Whoa...worm breeding...not even really sure how that works :lol:


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## mikemercer (Mar 13, 2009)

the only way not to be creeped out is to try it just think of all the nasty things you breed already  

asa worms are full of protein with no hard shell they make great feed to other animals or just recyleing your old organic material you should look up worms eat my garbage by mary appelhof really good book for begginers (ive got mine)


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 13, 2009)

I know, but it somehow is not the same, when the day comes, I touch a worm, I will probably be 6' under!


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## mikemercer (Mar 13, 2009)

ahhh you raise wax worms


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## hibiscusmile (Mar 13, 2009)

wax, super, meal!


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