When I was building my first compost worm bins I found a unique method online for breeding them faster than normally. The method not without its controversy is and some claim that it just does not work although I have found that most doubters when questions have not actually tried it, they just believe it does not work based on their experiences. There are however quite a few people who claim to have either recreated all or part of his process.
I guess you can say I am one of those people and have successfully returned the original worms along with masses of worm eggs back to my worm bin and completed the process a few more times. I even tried to change the bedding medium from soil to cardboard which did not trigger the same result.
This method is actually part of a larger guide called How To Breed, Raise, and Maintain A 100-Pound Stock of Worms in a Single Room that was written in 1995 and is still online today at http://www.jetcompost.com/burrow/tbp1.htm
Warning, It is nearly 23 years old this is a very difficult read. In my opinion, he is very hard to follow because of his writing style.
The crux of the article is that you can stacks of small adult Red Worms in a fraction of the space required for the same number of full-size adults. These small adult worms can be grown out to full size quite quickly.
Unless you want to be growing commercial quantity of worms in your laundry or bedroom the full scope of the article is of limited use but part of the process is to trigger worm growth faster than normal and that was of interest to me.
Compost worms have incredible abilities to thrive or survive in a wide range of environmental conditions. His process tricks the worms with poor conditions into survival mode which triggers rapid breeding between adult worms. Paley actually describes a process that kills the original worms because of those conditions but triggers a mass egg laying session immediately prior and because of this the worm quantity in weeks and months is much larger.
Paley also noticed that those young that hatched into this poor environment stayed very small yet continued to fully mature to adult stage, just at a smaller size like juvenile worms. Now when returned to a better environment these worms very quickly returned to their normal size. You can imagine if you were trying to commercially grow worms for resale as cheap as possible in a very small area then this could be a handy trick.
I have seen people who have said that because of neglect they have triggered similar conditions. After checking a bin that had been forgotten they found lots of small worms and when provided proper bedding and food they quickly gained size.
For reference:-
1000 Adult Worms is about 250gm
4000 Juvenile Worms is about 250gm
The whole principle works on the fact that worms will breed most often for one of three reasons:
So what this method does is it triggers all three of the above reasons at the same time. The process provides crowds a number of worms in a bedding that they find very distasteful, with plenty of food.
Now torturing worms is just not my idea of fun. I am pretty sure I burnt a few ants with a magnifying glass when I was a child but that was the extent of my child cruelty.
Since I dont need to grow small adult worms so there is no need to fully implement his method. So if we manipulate the environmental conditions that does not go as far as killing the original worms but return them to the main worm bin with the egg capsules we can improve our worm numbers without engaging in animal cruelty.
Worms dont like soil. They are composting worms so their perfect environment is rotting and composting organic matter like manures and vegetable scraps. You should throw in a handful of soil into a worm bin to add grit to the mixture to make digestion for the worms easier. Other than that typical worm guides will tell you to avoid soil with worms because they don't like it and will die if you add soil to your worm farm. This is probably because it represents a state where the organic matter they are feasting on is being depleted.
Soil as a bedding media is going to be our poor environmental condition.
We are going to crowd these worms into a 1 litre ice cream container and we are going to seal the top so they can't escape. Many people who have used those plastic worm bins you find at bunnings know what happens when worms don't like their environmental conditions. Mass evacuation as the worms trigger an exodus to leave that environment, often resulting in their own death.
So fill the container up to about 50 to 60% of its volume with the following:
then add 20 or 40 adult worms. Each worm is hermaphroditic so you don't have to worry about males and females. Adult worms have a Clitellum which is a thicker band of lighter colour about 3/4 of an inch from one end of the worm.
Thus we have completed the three conditions that triggers breeding. The last condition is temperature and the optimal breeding temperature is 25 degrees so find either a cool or warm position depending on what the prevailing conditions are outside.
Leave them in the icecream container for 5 weeks and then dump the whole container into your main worm bin which should be just before the eggs laid in week 1 start to hatch.
Make a new batch up and start again. In a few weeks as the eggs hatch your worm bin should be full of baby worms. It will take about another 7 weeks for those baby worms to reach maturity.
I personally have found that these worms absolutely love potato sacks on top of the worm bin. I usually have a couple on the top of each bin and I dump the contents in between the two. The hessian sacks rot down and get consumed by the worms but until they do they seem to really love moving between the weave of the bag. I have dumped out the middle of a single bag and found hundreds of worms camped out inside. They should be kept wet of course.
I hope somebody else can use the same method to boost the numbers of worms in their bins.
I guess you can say I am one of those people and have successfully returned the original worms along with masses of worm eggs back to my worm bin and completed the process a few more times. I even tried to change the bedding medium from soil to cardboard which did not trigger the same result.
This method is actually part of a larger guide called How To Breed, Raise, and Maintain A 100-Pound Stock of Worms in a Single Room that was written in 1995 and is still online today at http://www.jetcompost.com/burrow/tbp1.htm
Warning, It is nearly 23 years old this is a very difficult read. In my opinion, he is very hard to follow because of his writing style.
The crux of the article is that you can stacks of small adult Red Worms in a fraction of the space required for the same number of full-size adults. These small adult worms can be grown out to full size quite quickly.
Unless you want to be growing commercial quantity of worms in your laundry or bedroom the full scope of the article is of limited use but part of the process is to trigger worm growth faster than normal and that was of interest to me.
Compost worms have incredible abilities to thrive or survive in a wide range of environmental conditions. His process tricks the worms with poor conditions into survival mode which triggers rapid breeding between adult worms. Paley actually describes a process that kills the original worms because of those conditions but triggers a mass egg laying session immediately prior and because of this the worm quantity in weeks and months is much larger.
Paley also noticed that those young that hatched into this poor environment stayed very small yet continued to fully mature to adult stage, just at a smaller size like juvenile worms. Now when returned to a better environment these worms very quickly returned to their normal size. You can imagine if you were trying to commercially grow worms for resale as cheap as possible in a very small area then this could be a handy trick.
I have seen people who have said that because of neglect they have triggered similar conditions. After checking a bin that had been forgotten they found lots of small worms and when provided proper bedding and food they quickly gained size.
For reference:-
1000 Adult Worms is about 250gm
4000 Juvenile Worms is about 250gm
The whole principle works on the fact that worms will breed most often for one of three reasons:
- There is an abundance of food available.
- Their survival is threatened by environmental conditions, or
- They find themselves in an area which is saturated with suitable mates.
So what this method does is it triggers all three of the above reasons at the same time. The process provides crowds a number of worms in a bedding that they find very distasteful, with plenty of food.
Now torturing worms is just not my idea of fun. I am pretty sure I burnt a few ants with a magnifying glass when I was a child but that was the extent of my child cruelty.
Since I dont need to grow small adult worms so there is no need to fully implement his method. So if we manipulate the environmental conditions that does not go as far as killing the original worms but return them to the main worm bin with the egg capsules we can improve our worm numbers without engaging in animal cruelty.
Worms dont like soil. They are composting worms so their perfect environment is rotting and composting organic matter like manures and vegetable scraps. You should throw in a handful of soil into a worm bin to add grit to the mixture to make digestion for the worms easier. Other than that typical worm guides will tell you to avoid soil with worms because they don't like it and will die if you add soil to your worm farm. This is probably because it represents a state where the organic matter they are feasting on is being depleted.
Soil as a bedding media is going to be our poor environmental condition.
We are going to crowd these worms into a 1 litre ice cream container and we are going to seal the top so they can't escape. Many people who have used those plastic worm bins you find at bunnings know what happens when worms don't like their environmental conditions. Mass evacuation as the worms trigger an exodus to leave that environment, often resulting in their own death.
So fill the container up to about 50 to 60% of its volume with the following:
- 3/4 Poor Quality Sandy Soil
- 1/4 Puree Vegetable Scraps.
then add 20 or 40 adult worms. Each worm is hermaphroditic so you don't have to worry about males and females. Adult worms have a Clitellum which is a thicker band of lighter colour about 3/4 of an inch from one end of the worm.
Thus we have completed the three conditions that triggers breeding. The last condition is temperature and the optimal breeding temperature is 25 degrees so find either a cool or warm position depending on what the prevailing conditions are outside.
Leave them in the icecream container for 5 weeks and then dump the whole container into your main worm bin which should be just before the eggs laid in week 1 start to hatch.
Make a new batch up and start again. In a few weeks as the eggs hatch your worm bin should be full of baby worms. It will take about another 7 weeks for those baby worms to reach maturity.
I personally have found that these worms absolutely love potato sacks on top of the worm bin. I usually have a couple on the top of each bin and I dump the contents in between the two. The hessian sacks rot down and get consumed by the worms but until they do they seem to really love moving between the weave of the bag. I have dumped out the middle of a single bag and found hundreds of worms camped out inside. They should be kept wet of course.
I hope somebody else can use the same method to boost the numbers of worms in their bins.