I keep worms. In my basement. This all started several years ago when I was some YouTube video about some guy making “vermicompost” in the backyard. Sounded great!
Compost is one thing. 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.
We choose to intercept that natural process and put it to use for our advantage. Worm castings can be bought from commercial sources – last year I saw a 1 quart bag at Agway for $15. I have nearly 20 gallons of fresh castings from this past year.
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.
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, but I’ve had a problem with insects, which I think more frequent, but smaller, feedings would suppress.
Food for the little beasts consists primarily of food scraps from the kitchen – potato peelings, 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. When the vegetable thaws, it’s mushy. Great for worms, but Clarence Birdseye made a fortune figuring out how to freeze food properly.
I save my egg shells. These are crushed and provide grit for the worms’ digestive tract. Worms have no teeth, so instead of being chewed, the food is ground up by the grit as it passes through the worm innards. I’m sure I’m oversimplifying this…
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. A lot of people complain that most of the corn grown in this country is GMO, which is probably true, but I don’t think that’s a big issue for worms. I haven’t seen any great mutations yet.
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!
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 who grows worms commercially.
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.