New - Better Worms for Composting !

My little guys are doing very well - I finally saw the little cocoons that Brad (from Colorado Earthworms) was telling me to watch for. He said, "The cocoons are very small and look kind of like a lemon, once you start to see those you will notice little guys everywhere, the worms will lay an egg a week and each on can hold several young. Once they get to that point you are going to notice your compost disappearing a little faster." I was shy about disturbing the mass in my working tray and just wasn't sure what I was looking for but now I see them! And I see lots of little new wigglers!



Now, here's something interesting. Brad has been experimenting with European Crawlers, another type of worm. They are much larger, and really go to town on the compost. He started a little experiment with 300 worms in a bucket to see how much they will consume in a month. I told him to let me know the results, and I just heard back - sounds like these are a very good composting worm!

Brad says "I just checked on my little test, Amazing! Those little guys turned 12 cups of peat moss into castings in 2 weeks! I still need to sift it out but at first glance all the worms look fat and happy and the castings have replaced most of the contents of the bucket. I think if someone is looking to just make castings for the garden this is the way to do it. I bet if I took 10 buckets of peat moss I could have 10-20 pounds of castings in a very short time. Neat stuff."