Nourishing Soil and Earth with Red Wigglers!

Hello again folks, I want to share with you some strategies and tips that I’ve figured out on how to breed earth worms from the 20 years or so that I’ve spent doing just that. Here I’m going to be talking most about breeding red worms or red wigglers. These are the kinds of earthworms that most folks are familiar with and most folks find in their soil.

But first a little background on breeding worms in general. There are a bunch of different varieties of earthworm that you can use to make compost. My favorite are the red wiggler which are a species of eisenia fetida. You can also use European night crawlers which don’t multiply but seem to be more robust from some of the information I’ve read out there. The European or Belgian nightcrawler is also known as the Dendrobaena worm. They grow to be thick and fat, sometimes as thick a man’s thumb.

Anglers like them a lot. But I wouldn’t know about that, not living close to any fishing spots I don’t sell my worms to any anglers that I’m aware of. I do use breed European nightcrawlers but not as much as the red wiggler. But I suggest that if you’re interested in both that you keep them separated. I reckon they serve slightly different purposes.

Okay, to get to the nuts of how to breed earth worms I’m going to take you through building a small worm farm for home or an apartment. This is how I started breeding worms. You’ll need a big rubber container, the kind you’ll see at the big stores that are used as totes and such. These work well because they’re durable and a good size. Some folks will say you’ll get around 1200 worms per pound, but I reckon this is generous, you should only count on about half that for the number of worms in a pound.

If you’re using my measurement you’ll likely want to give these 600 or so red wigglers about a square foot of space. This will get you started nicely in the how of how to breed earth worms because you’ll have a good start to building a worm farm.

I’ve seen folks use a whole number of rubber bins as they start growing their worm farm and you’ll find even if you’re not interested in selling red worms that there’ll be a number of bins you can use to limit the amount of waste that you throw out. when it was just the 2 of us. Me and my late wife Joan living in the apartment, we used 2 bins and we hardly ever tossed out any organic waste.

Both of our bins were about 2 feet long by about 1 foot wide and about 2 feet deep. You don’t want to build your worm composter deeper than 2 feet as not many worms will bury deeper than that. So keep that in mind.

Hope you’ve liked this first installment on how to breed earth worms. I’ll finish it up in the next post and you’ll be very soon on you way to breeding red worms and becoming a successful worm farmer!