I keep worms. In my basement. This all started several years ago when I was watching a YouTube video about some guy making “vermicompost” in the backyard. Sounded great! I’m always curious about stuff.
Everybody knows that compost makes your garden grow better. Compost is great stuff. But – if you let worms eat the compost and whatever food scraps you have coming from the kitchen, the “worm castings” they produce are significantly better fertilizer than simple compost. Basically, it’s worm poop. Think about how nature works. Trees shed leaves, the leaves rot, worms eat the rotten leaves, and trees grow from eating the fertilizer that is worm shit. The Circle of Life.
Worm castings can be bought from commercial sources – Amazon’s even in on it. A 5 pound bag (just a shade over 2 kilograms) is going for between $10-20. But it’s very easy to raise worms that will produce castings for you. I recently (spring 2025) “harvested” my five bins, and collected about 20 pounds (~9 kilos – I’m doing this in my head) of castings. The worms were returned to their respective bins to run through the process again.
The bulk of my worms are so-called “red wigglers” (Eisenia fetida). They are kind of small – too small to use for fishing, but are great for composting. European night crawlers (Dendrobaena hortensis) are also used, and have the added benefit that they can be sold for fishing, perhaps creating an additional income stream.
I currently have five worm bins, three large 27 gallon storage containers and two containers that are perhaps 10 or 12 gallons. The bins all have holes in the lid for ventilation, but are otherwise unmodified. The bedding is typically shredded newspaper, office paper, and cardboard. Paper with a lot of color, and shiny magazine-style paper are excluded. I have beaten a Walmart shredder nearly to death for these worms. The bedding should be wet, but not dripping. A ball of bedding should hold together like a snowball, but very little water, if any, should drip out when squeezed. Rotted leaves from last fall also make good bedding, if a little less convenient in the middle of winter…
I’ve been feeding the worms about every other week for the past year (this is end-of-March 2025), and it seems to work. A problem I think I’m having is that when I put two week’s worth of food in the bin, it’s hard to keep the flies (both house flies and fruit flies) at bay. I’m changing to a weekly routine where I feed less.
Food for the little beasts consists primarily of food scraps from the kitchen – apple cores, banana skins, and old broccoli seem to be core in the mix, but any vegetable prep waste goes into a plastic bag which is stored in the freezer. Freezing vegetables (slowly, like in my freezer) breaks the cell walls of the plant matter. As the vegetables thaw prior to feeding day, the broken cells turn to mush and ready for further breakdown by bacteria and worms. Onions and citrus are avoided – worms don’t like them so much. They love grapes and bananas – anything sweet like that. Potatoes are supposed to be avoided, but I’ve had a few of those tiny potatoes in the bin, and I find the entire potato gone, but the entire skin left behind, so they clearly like potato! And the old rubric about worms liking coffee grounds? It turns out they do! Of course those little KCups don’t build the stash up quickly, but all helps. Bread scraps also make decent feed, so long as the bread is soaked in water to make it mushy. Yeah, I know, but the worms are going to love it!
The worms also get some grain. Typically it’s cornmeal as it can be bought cheaply, although they recently got a bag of oatmeal that I found in the back of the cupboard (oops). Commercial worm breeders working in the “bait worm” business tend to use worm chow (and I’m sorely disappointed that you can’t get Purina Worm Chow from the folks at Checkerboard Square). Worm chow for the most part seems to be chicken feed for laying hens, and/or “laying mash”, which is mostly just ground up corn or soy with ground calcium added to aid in eggshell development. This added calcium is beneficial for the worms as well – I save egg shells to be crushed and fed to the worms, providing grit for the worms’ digestive tracts. Worms have no teeth, so food is ground up by the grit as it passes through the worm innards, kind of like chickens. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying this…
I’ll admit that there are a lot of people out there that know a whole lot more about worms than I do, so to learn about setting up a worm farm, just search the internet for composting worms. One great resource, both for information and for purchasing worms, is Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm out in Pennsylvania. I’ve bought worms from Uncle Jim, and I’ve bought worms locally – there’s a guy out near Paxton, Massachusetts who grows worms commercially, though I can’t locate contact information.
Also, Planet Natural has a worm guide that looks reasonable. Don’t buy anything using their links…
I’ll try to add more to this page as we go along.