Red Wigglers Arrived

The 2,000 red wigglers arrived today. Vince was ready for them and had their “housing” all ready.

Even though he bought a worm bin for them, he wanted to put them all in one big tote for now and get them established, then he’ll divide them up. We’ll keep half in the tote and half in the worm bin. I think Vince just wants to get in the routine of feeding them and doing whatever needs to be done before we have two groups to feed.

The bedding looks two different colors because of the light/shadows. It’s all the same.

Most of the instructions and videos suggested putting the food in a corner today, then tomorrow moving over a few inches and putting more food, the next day moving over and putting more food, then when we get back to the starting point, that food should be all gone. It isn’t good to overfeed or underfeed so we don’t want food stacking up not being consumed.

There they are! Vince kinda spread them out a bit, not moving them too far from the food source. For 2,000, we should feed 250 grams per day. They reproduce very quickly once they’re comfortable in their new surroundings so I’ll have to watch and make sure they aren’t eating the food and running out. I suppose in a few months, we’ll be having to feed 500 grams per day.

They’ll eat scraps – peelings off carrots, banana peelings, any kind of fruit (except citrus) that’s going bad. They’ll eat most any trimmings from fresh vegetables, except potato peelings.

A few weeks ago when I was cleaning 25 pounds of carrots to can, I saved all the peelings and froze them in 125 gram portions. Today I cleaned out the fridge and had some bok choy that was left from a recipe, the ends of a cabbage head that I had been whacking on to make coleslaw so I chopped all that and put it in 250 g. portions.

I feel like we’ve just added 2,000 mouths to fed to our collection of hungry critters.

Hopefully, the worms will produce lots of castings for our garden.