I get at least an email per week asking me how to make bedding for breeding worms. Then I get more about how to make bedding without peat moss. We do not use peat moss because it is nonrenewable, so we opt for creating our own “Worm-Safe” bedding, which can be used for breeding Red Worms, African Night Crawlers and European Nightcrawlers, also known as “Euro Worms”. All red composting worms can use our Worm-Safe worm bedding recipe.
I have made a long video explaining the process. I apologize for the length of the video but I wanted to get all of the information in. You can also see a cameo of my son’s pig, Spamela.
Making the worm breeder bedding is a two part process. The first part is mixing about 40% fresh horse, rabbit or cow manure, or aged fowl manure, with 60% straw or other brown material like dried grass clippings. That mixture is moistened and allowed to heat for a couple of weeks.
Then, once past the compost heating stage, we mix that with 50/50 with shredded cardboard and newspaper that has been wet down, mixed and also allowed to age about a week or so.
We mix those two parts together, 50-50 and let it age again for week to ensure that it will not heat again. We take daily temperature readings with a composting thermometer.
Then we add the bedding to our composting or bait worm breeder bins. We only use about 3 inches of that mixture and we put in our breeders. They stay in that worm bin for 21 days at around 75 degrees and then they are moved to fresh bins. The egg capsules and babies, which are now in the bin with our original mixture, are placed in an incubator, bin and all, and hatch out. We keep them in that bin until we can see them easily. At that point we put them into a growout worm bed and feed them to get them to mature size as quickly as possible.
I will be posting some diagrams and pictures of our system soon. Please ask your questions below or in our forum.
Thank you.
Ken
Worm Man’s Worm Farm. Wormman.com
