Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

Recently, a mixture of European Night Crawlers and Red Wrigglers came in the mail. They arrived on Tuesday, a writhing 1-lb mass of the delightful little squirmers mixed with some shredded newspaper.

They have been given a rather sizable bed, which is about 4×8 feet, or 32 square feet. That’s quite a lot of surface area for a single pound of worms. Since I plan to raise them commercially, I want them to reproduce as fast as possible. Hopefully a nice, large bed will encourage them. Given enough space and the right temperature, they can double in mass every 30 days.

The two worm species are Eisenia Fetida (Red Wrigglers) and Eisenia Hortensis (European Night Crawler). They are the same genus, but not the same species, so while they are quite similar biologically, they don’t naturally interbreed. (Oddly enough, humans and Klingons are the same species. )

The Europeans (E. Hortensis) are a bit more hardy in the cold. They burrow deeper, and last longer in icy water. They can also tolerate salt water long enough to be used for bait in the sea. Furthermore, they can work the soil in a garden fairly well, provided you have enough mulch and a compost pile for them to eat from.

The term for compost worms is Epigeic. That means “above the soil”. They tend to live above the soil, in heaps of compost such as fallen leaves, fruit, manure, etc. Naturally occuring heaps like this are actually fairly common. E. Hortensis specializes more in cooler, wetter compost whereas E. Fetida is better when it is warmer and slightly dryer. Since a worm bed is often more moist towards the bottom and more dry towards the top, they can coexist fairly well. In a deeper bin, it might be necessary to use a fan to keep the lower layers cool.

E. Hortensis is a great worm for bait, so if I can get them to reproduce well in the climate of Parma, Idaho, I may be able to make a good living this way. E. Fetida is actually a good bait worm as well, however — raising them exclusively is not necessarily a bad idea. I may actually decide to raise a mix of the two as simple compost worms. We shall see.

Related posts:

1. My Search Results
2. The Perils Of Link Baiting

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.