Worm Farming, and Keeping Your Worms Happy – Getting Started
We all know worms are cool, fun, and exciting… wait… they are right? Well, they are to us and possibly you. But how do we care for them properly? I’ll tell you.
Keeping your worms happy isn’t that difficult. The main three things to consider are temperature, moisture, and bedding.
Red Wigglers are found just below the surface, so they’ll be very happy in a typical garden/storage bin that you find in any box store or online.
What you put in the box as the initial bedding is incredibly flexible, but we’ve found that finely shredded paper works best for us. You can use an office shredder and newspaper or clean recycled paper, or we offer our own worm bedding here.
Wet the paper before placing it in the bin. It should be moist but not dripping wet. You should be able to squeeze a handful of the bedding without excess water running off.
Place the worms in their new home. You can loosely cover the bin with a lid to keep it dark and safe inside. I recommend leaving the worms alone until the next day. This will let them acclimate to the new environment.
The temperature should be comfortable. Ideally, a temperature of 75-85 degrees F is best for Red Wigglers, but they can tolerate a much wider range.
Note: Red Wigglers can easily be raised inside. Some vermicomposters have better luck farming worm colonies indoors. We do both and raise red wigglers indoors and outside in non-extreme temperatures.
On the second day, you can feed the worms by placing your food scraps/biodegradables on one side of the container. This allows the worms half of the container to retreat to if they don’t like the food you provided.
At this point, your worms should have everything they need to grow and multiply. If you treat them with a bit of care, they’ll provide you with more worms and a cool way to get rid of food waste.