Hello folks, as promised I want to finish up telling you about how to set up your own first home or apartment composter for breeding worms. This is exactly how I started with my late wife over 20 years ago. We lived in an apartment back then but we still managed breeding earth worms in that tiny place.

Now before I carry on, I just want to let you know about this really great and comprehensive course for breeding worms. If you’re interested in a complete book about all the ins and outs of raising worms then be sure to go and visit this product I’m sharing with you. It has much more to offer than I could share with you in this blog of mine. You’ll learn how to breed red worms and all sorts of different worms including breeding worms for fishing which is usually done with European nightcrawlers. This is also all about super worm breeding. These suckers get huge and fat. This guy also has terrific advice on how to profit on breeding worms.

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Okay, so now back to the building of a composter in the how to worm farm posts that I’ve been writing about. Again, this is the very same method I used when starting out, so I know it works.

As mentioned, I favor rubber for indoor use, though now out on the farm I use wood. That way you can make it as big as you need for your red wigglers.

So buy yourself a big rubber container with a lid, about 2 feet long by a foot wide by no more than 2 feet deep. Raising worms is not rocket science, but you need to understand there habitats naturally. And they won’t bury more than about 2 feet.

Okay so you’ve got your rubber container, let’s continue on with how to breed earth worms. You’ll want to drill several holes into the rubber container of about an eighth of an inch in diameter. Be sure not drill lower than about 4 inches from the bottom.

Put holes all around the container and on the cover too. Now for successfully breeding worms you’ll want to create a layer of bedding for them. I really favor straw because I’m out in the country. Peat moss works very well but is expensive and when Joan and I started we used newspaper. Most of it uses soy based inks. You’ll want to add this as shredded paper for best results.

So now you’re learning all about how to worm farm. But we’re not finished. Throw a thin layer, about a quarter of an inch, of soil over the paper and thoroughly moisten. It is best to use a spray bottle with a rain or mist setting rather than a stream of water. Let it soak for a good day before you add your worms. The book I’ve spoken about earlier has great resources for where to find your first worms to start out with.

Add a pound or so of worms and start feeding them. The smaller the scraps the better. Give them a consistent feeding schedule but a varied diet and your breeding worms will reward you for years.

Just a couple of things to keep in mind when breeding worms. Don’t feed them animal products as these can generally ruin your results. So no meat, bones or eggs. Also, leave the ecosystem as it unless you start getting centipedes in the worm bin. Breeding worms don’t like centipedes as they eat the worm eggs and baby worms.

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Other than this and the comprehensive book on breeding worms which I highly recommend you get, your breeding worms will be very successful and you’ll be leaving a smaller carbon footprint.

To begin at this exciting and wriggly new enterprise will require a little planning, and a lot of worms. The simplest way to begin will require the new worm farmer to purchase a plastic or rubber tub that can hold roughly two feet of dirt. They will also need something to line the bottom with as well as a bit of wire mesh screen such as one would find in a typical window.

You will need to take your plastic tub and poke several holes in the lower part of the bottom. Do not poke them in the bottom itself. Place them on the side instead.

Then you will take your mesh screen and place it in the bottom to cover the drainage holes you created. This is to prevent your worms from attempting a prison break in a bid for wormy freedom. Place some rocks or gravel on the bottom of the tub then cover this over with a liner. Typical liners include a newspaper or cornflakes. Fill your tub up several feet with soil and throw some composting materials on top such as coffee grounds, banana, peels, and animal manure. Breeding worms is simple with these items in place because it creates a welcoming environment for them.

Once this is done it is best to allow the container to settle for two weeks or so before adding in the worms as they will do their best to escape the overly warm soil. The composting process will cause it to heat up to an uncomfortable level. Those individuals who actually use the mesh screen might not have to worry about this or even decide to care about the comfort of their little wiggling dividends.

The best way to get started breeding worms quickly is to order them online or at a local shop that sells them. This will be the most expensive part of the process but you are generally guaranteed to get all of your worms to be of the same species. The easiest worm type to start with are red ones. Avoid trying to start with night crawlers as they bury themselves deep to reproduce and they will not desire to do so in a small bin.

A thousand worms can become many tens of thousand over the course of a year if their beds are continually split with a new bin started for each. After two months or so you should have enough breeding worms to actually begin selling them without running out. If you want to start selling immediately simply purchase extra worms online and sell off the excess to cover costs for the business.

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!

Joan (that’s my late wife) didn’t like how much garbage we were throwing out each week. She cared for the earth before it was popular. So I started out getting some earthworms from some friends who had a yard. And that’s how we first got into the business of worm farming.

We grew our little handful of red worms into dozens and then hundreds. Now I reckon I’ve got to have thousands and thousands of these little red wigglers on my farm here. So I started the blog thing to share my knowledge and I guess love of these earthworms.

The earth worm is not hard to breed. In fact raising worms is a heck of a lot easier than growing my organic soybeans. They don’t bring me in as much money as the soybeans do, but I owe these worms a lot to the success of my soybeans I grow. The earthworm is scientifically known as eisenia fetida. Haven’t a clue what that means, but I figured you might like to know.

All redworms, branding worms, tiger worms or red wigglers are good worms to help in your composting efforts and to help in the decaying of organic matter. These kinds of earth worms will pretty much digest anything organic except for the hard stuff like bones. Also meat is preferably not used at it’ll just putrefy and the worms don’t like that.

You might have also heard of European nightcrawlers, these also make great worms for composting. They’re also sometimes called Belgian nightcrawlers maybe because Belgium is infested with them. Breeding white worms can work well too, and sometimes blue worms too. Though blue worms work best in the tropical regions where it’s warm and damp.

Breeding worms should be encouraged by everyone. Like I said, we bred earthworms when we were just living in a small apartment in the city. You can always give away the compost to friends. They’ll love it.