Help with a mouldy worm farm

Hi Adam & thanks for that info....I haven't added anything other than vegie scraps, certainly no bread or rice, but thanks for that....I shall lack it away in my brain somewhere

 

With a 3 layer bin, you can 'force' the worms down. Restack the trays so that the bottom one is on the top and leave the lid off for a day or two. They'll migrate down away from the light.

 

Chris you can use the light extraction method if you don't have a sieve. Feed the worms and about 3 days later remove the top layer of the worm farm where the food is. If there is a second layer which you don't want the castings from remove it also. Hopefully you are down to the bottom layer or the layers you want the castings from. Take this tray(s) to a work bench or somewhere you have a desk lamp you can use. Tip it out onto a sheet of plastic in a heap. You can do this out on the ground in sunlight but means you have to work on you knees unless you have an outdoor table you can use.

Basically tip the bedding into a pile. Go have a cup of tea or coffee and then come back. The worms will be retreating to the bottom of the mound. Sometimes not as fast as I would like lol. Start to remove the bedding slowly. As you find some worms work from another part of the pile. Any worms you pull out by accident and you will, just drop them to the back of the pile. Don't put them in the area you are removing the bedding from. The light and the vibration from your fingers will keep the worms going down. I have just spent just over 2 days doing this. I am changing my management practices. Much less bedding, double the density of worms in my breeder beds (500grams to 1 kg of raw worms) and 6 times the density in my grower beds (500grams to 3 kg)

As the pile reduces, just push it back into a heap to help condense the worms. Eventually you will have a pile of raw worms. You probably don't need to go that far as they will stress and froff up. Just put the worms back into your farm. Put the tray back on top with fresh bedding. Just ensure the bedding is continuous through the layers. Use the casting or set them aside in tub and wet them down. Then cover with a wet carpet or old hessian bags. Put them where they can get some sunshine over the surface. You can put some food in with them. In about 21 days the eggs should all be hatched. Allow a few weeks for the worms to grow and repeat the light extraction process or you can put some 90% shade cloth strips (200mm wide) over a couple of sections of the castings. Put your food only on the shade cloth. After about 3 days remove the shade cloth and empty the young worms into another bed if you want to start another farm. There is not point in putting them back into the original farm.

Having said all that you can just spread the castings around the garden worms, eggs and all. The loss of eggs and worms plus the new bedding will spark another breeding cycle.

 

Chris I just re read your post. You only have two layers. Fill the top layer with some fresh bedding then add the 3 layer and fill it with bedding. Water the farm. Give it a couple of days for the worms to move up. Then remove the bottom layer. If the bedding has mostly been eaten out there shouldn't be much fiberous material left in it. If you can get a sieve from Bunnings for around $6 in the Garden Section this will be fine to use. Just get small amount of bedding ( say 2 or 3 cupped hand fulls) at a time and just move the sieve from side to side over a plastic sheet or wheel barrow. Just give the sieve a tap to clear any bits that have blocked up. You will remove about 95% of the bedding and worms from the castings. You can do the other method in my last post as it really doesn't matter.

Use the whole 3 layers of your worm farm so you can grow the maximum number of worms.

 

Somehow I managed to scream for help on another question thread thinking it was here....anyway....HELP, again!!!! Please....the lower batch of worms are trying to flee the worm farm. Everything was going just fine, then I decided to take out the original layer of the worm farm to use the light method to separate the worms from the castings.....hummed along just fine. I had placed the 2nd layer back onto the worm farm while doing this. Later in the day I checked the 2nd layer and there were worms EVERYWHERE.....climbing up the sides of the box....all over the place. The only thing I did was to put some cow manure into the box.....but I've done that before and it did n't get this reaction. Can you tell me what's going on? I hope I've described it in an understandable way. Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

Chris I have no idea why they would be doing this. Can you tell me about your weather? Has it rained overnight? Sometimes if they anticipate rain they will climb up to the top of the bed for fear of drowning. Did you dig over the second layer? If they are still doing it put a desk lamp over the top of them and leave it on overnight. This should drive them back down. Very strange that they suddenly are doing this.
Do you know what type of worms you have? Reds, Africans, Indian Blues? Reds are much more settled than the others. The Blues will just up and leave anytime. Worms have no brains and are very dumb like sheep herded in a yard. They will go for the corners and pack themselves in. This could trigger an over crowding reaction and they will leave on mass.

Is it still daylight over there? If so leave the lid off to let the light in.

 

Thanks Brian.....so happy to get any help you can give me. I live in Perth....and summer just won't quit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think we are 'supposed' to get some rain later in the week....(can only hope) but the reaction was so quick....one moment the worms were the same as per usual....next they're climbing the walls, it was quite startling. I'm not sure which type of worms they are....bought them in Bunnings and I'm assuming they're reds. I did turn them out of the box to replace the newspaper in the bottom of it, gave them a bit if a mix up to aerate the castings as I'd read somewhere that it is good for them....I went out earlier while it was still light (it's dark now) and put back some of the worms from the original base that I was getting the castings from.....had obtained quite a heap of worm castings, which was the idea in the first place. So put them back with the ones that were 'climbing the walls' then added another box with a combination of vegie scraps and cow manure to try and get them up into that level. I'll be interested to see what they're up to by the morning.
I had a friend over this afternoon and she was very interested in the worms....she has several old baths at her property that she could use for worm farming. I thought I'd seen a YouTube video or something like...on your web site, it was of a man feeding the worms. As I say, I thought it was you....but I can't find the link any more. Maybe I'm mistaken....anyhow, if it was you, could you send me the link please? My friend left after much discussion and said she was inspired to try worm farming. So I've done something right

 

I still think it is very strange that they did that. When I empty out the beds and put the worms back into fresh bedding they don't do that You will have Red Wrigglers. If they were Africans and put straight into fresh bedding I could understand their behaviour. Hopefully they have settled. Just make sure your cow manure is nice and damp and the veggie scraps have been frozen or pulped to assist in the decomposition process.

Aerating the beds does a couple of things. It puts oxygen into the bedding to help the microbs. It also traps air which assists with contolling the temperature.

Chris I have no idea about You Tube. I have watched some worm harvesting things but thats it. I am not that smart yet.

If you friend wants to start a worm farm, she would be best getting a 10 lt bucket of worms and bedding from you. Don't put them into a bath tub straight away as it will be too big an area for so few worms. I suppose thinking about it just a small pile of manure at one end. One of those bags of manure on the side of the road would be heaps to start with. In spring add another bag of manure next to the first one so the two piles meet. The worms will move across at their own pace. After a week or two dig over the two piles and mix together. Wait a month then add another bag and continue the cycle till the tub is full of manure and worms.

The other option is buy from a breeder. I can post to WA but I would only send to an Express Post area. That way they will be there next day. Outside this area could take over a week and there is a risk of losing the worms.

 

Might be my video, Brian? I'm using a bath, I mentioned food and manure etc.

Other than that Chris, and not to dispute your knowledge Brian, I built my entire bath farm (shallow bath by placing timber underneath the shademesh) by making a mix of wood mulch, Chinese Elm leaves and hand-torn newspaper (not knowing about horse manure bedding yet). I added one small bag of worms/bedding/castings/eggs from another member here, waited a while and started feeding. The castings I recently harvested had wood chunks in it still. So, even if you don't know what you are doing, it can work. Now I know better, I'd start small and work up but jumping right in can give you results too.

 

I always recommend horse manure because it is easy to use and I get it free . Mind you I have to bag it myself. Any vegatable matter that is decomposing would do well but wood is a bit to slow. Worms also breed very well in horse manure and fatten up on cow manure. The reason I said to start out with minimal bedding is that if the worms spread too far apart the breeding will be slower as they have to find each other to mate. The closer together they are the faster the breeding rate can be. They just take longer to get well established if you filled a bath tub and put in only a few worms.

I think you are right about the video. Just make Chris happy and put my name on it lol

 

S.O.P. Is it possible to get the link to your video? It's been driving me batty wondering where I found it the first time around

 

Ha, ha....cheeky suggestion. I'm gaining knowledge by the day. Maybe my worms are just having an orgy on the cow manure???

 

Chris try this link. If it doesn't work it is in the Welcome Forum under "Hello I am Brian" second last page I think it was



https://forums.permaculture.org.au/showthread.php?12010-Hello-I-am-Brian/page5

 

Thanks for that Brian....not the correct one, but I appreciate your going tot he trouble for me. I actually found it through watching that clip....it was from 'Just add worms'.....here's the link if you're interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOqJLHkAs-M&feature=related

Thanks again, Brian

 

Thanks Chris. I like the way he has the tubs elevated. I was surprized when he said he had only about 6,000 worms in there. I would have expected more. It would be about 1 1/2kg of worms. I just packed some of my breeding beds which are 32lt cement mixing trays with 4,000 worms and my grower bed the same size with 12,000 worms. Thats almost wall to wall worm.

In just over 3 weeks time I will harvest all the eggs and worms from my grower beds. I will place the worms back into the bed with fresh bedding and the eggs and castings will go into an incubation bed to hatch. The problem I see with the bathtub idea from a production point of view is the amount of bedding to sift through every 4 weeks. Thats the reason I have changed to the minimal bedding maximum worm system. I spent nearly 3 days over Easter sifting through my beds and still didn't finish.

I still have some bigger beds that I haven't done but will leave them as is so I can supply the Bed Run market where I take a bucket of worms, bedding and eggs out and sell this way. It is the same as SOP did and if you supply your friend. Can't post them that way so the other method is for worm only sales. Thanks again for the link.

 

Glad you liked the link, Brian. You really can learn anything on YouTube, can't you? I love to learn....keep on keeping on, I say