EASY How To Start An Indoor Red Wiggler Worm Farm

[Music] everybody it's Tim from homesteaders discovery and my wife Debbie and I are getting ready to start a new warm bin and we thought we would take this opportunity to show how we get our indoor worm bin setup right now we're taking worms from an existing bin and of course you can get your worms from any source but we're using red wigglers and we found that this system works best for red wigglers because the bins aren't that deep and right now so debbie is going through and is going to separate out about 200 worms it's gonna take a while and all she's doing is just taking the worms and putting them in a Tupperware container and as she does that you can see that the worms are very healthy in this system we have egg cartons in here we have some fruits and vegetables and every now and then we will feed them our worm chow which tends to work very well but for this bin we've been feeding them mainly fruits and vegetables and coffee grounds and coffee filters which they like do not buy the synthetic coffee filters and expect those to work they do not eat those these are paper coffee filters so they eat those really well and they also eat the egg cartons and as you can see the worm castings are very dark and looking very good so we will be right back with how to setup the actual worm bin as soon as we get these separated okay so here's where we're at so far the first thing you want to do is get all your supply set up and so what you're going to need is you're going to need a tub of some kind to put the worm bedding in in our case we're using these black plastic tubs they're basically concrete mixing tubs that you can get it Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever you can use a Tupperware container there are many different options that you have we're showing what we've been using successfully and these aren't that expensive they're around five to ten bucks apiece so they're comparable to the cost of a Tupperware container or a tote so we've got our peat moss set up here and you can use any type of bedding you can use coco coir you can use shredded paper we've heard that peat moss is not the best to use because it's a little bit acidic and it tends to destroy the microbes but we've been successful using this and it might be better if we had used something else but we have a lot of peat moss we're trying to use that up the other thing is you want to have your food in our case we have some thanksgiving scraps leftover here these are just vegetables and there's no onions in here you don't want to use onions you don't want to use citrus anything like that just in our case we have potatoes carrots some celery and some other leafy green brussel sprout types of vegetables in here over here in this bin we have our egg cartons that we've talked about in our other videos we'd like to use these because they not only eat this and [Music] compost it down but they also it also holds the moisture in it gives them a moist place to go to if they ever need to get moisture so we're letting that soak right now it takes a while to get this nice and wet so it's advisable to just go ahead and let that so you can tear this up into little pieces if you want as long as it's nice and what we just use the whole container and in this container here we have ground-up eggshells we eat three to six boiled eggs a day so we take our egg shells from that and we let them dry and then we put them in a spice grinder or a coffee grinder and grind it up into a powder form and we just put it into a container that had mozzarella cheese in it at one time makes for a good eggshells sprinkler or shaker we also have some spent coffee grounds you do not want to use coffee grounds that have not been used you want to may take just the used coffee grounds use those and your worm bin we also have our two hundred worms approximately in this Tupperware container that came from the existing bin that we had and once you have that set up you have everything ready to go this goes pretty quick and it's pretty easy you also want to soak your peat moss and Debbie's going to show the squeeze test here you want it nice and wet and you want to be able to show as you squeeze it just drops of water coming out you don't want it super wet a lot of people have a tendency to over soak their worm bins and although worms can do well in a under water even that is not the ideal moisture content that you want from your peat moss so once you have all that set up you're good to go you're good to go ahead and get your worm bin started the other thing that we found is helpful is to have a little lamp here we have a lamp that we're using to keep the worms from crawling out because what happens is the worms when they're introduced to a new environment they want to explore they're looking for food they're looking for other bedding sources things like that that's just natural and you may find that some want to is and they'll start crawling out of the sides of the worm bin and it's if you follow these steps you'll know that your bin is healthy it's just that the worms naturally want to explore so the what the light does is it keeps them it keeps them down because worms do not like light so they will stay in the bin for the most part and once they've been in that environment for a good 24 to 48 hours they'll settle down they'll know that their food source is in this area and they will tend to stay in that area eat reproduce and continue to live happily so we're going to go through the steps now and just show you how easy this is so Debbie's taken the eggshells and she's just going to coat the top of this bedding with the eggshells and now she's gonna take some coffee grounds and she's just gonna sprinkle it throughout the bin and it's okay to throw the paper in there anything like that - and the vegetables but first the worms and it doesn't necessarily have to be in this order but that's the way we do it so here's our worms again we took these from an existing bin and if you'll notice they're looking healthy they're nice and moist they're plump you don't see any worms that look dry or too small because they've been lacking the moisture or the food and over time and before Debbie puts these vegetables on you'll see the light they'll naturally want to burrow down to get away from the light might take them a little bit but they will eventually go down you can see there's less and less showing up on top as they burrow down these are red wigglers red wigglers our top feeders they tend to feed in the first or the top six inches of the bedding as opposed to night crawlers that tend to burrow deep into the into the bedding and that's why this system works pretty well for red wigglers because it's not necessarily deep but it is it's got a lot of surface area for the worms to feed in the first six inches these guys are pretty pretty content but there you can see they're already starting to burrow down into the into the bedding to get away from that light so baby's going to add the vegetable scraps now some people will say that you need to feed in only a certain corner of the bedding as opposed to spreading it all out we've tried both ways and honestly we have not experienced any negative effects by just spreading the food out throughout the whole top of the bedding or most of it anyway and then the next thing we do is we take our soaked egg carton and we just lay it over the top of the vegetables and that's pretty much it that's how easy it is to get a worm bin started and we'll keep an eye on this bin for the next two or three days to make sure everyone inside is happy and not trying to escape too much again you'll always have one or two that'll try to get out or more but if you keep a light on them and you keep their environment nice and moist and give them plenty of food they will eventually settle down and end up being happy worms okay so that's it that's how easy it is to get a worm bin started there are other ways to do this you can drill holes in the bottom of these and have a catchment system to catch the leachate the leachate is just the juices that fall through from the vegetables and the castings and all that we've tried that method but for us since we are worm farming indoors we find this to be the cleanest method as you can see we're in our kitchen so there's no smells there's no stuff draining out of the out of the tubs anywhere so this is clean it's fast and easy to do and our population of worms has exploded and we find this very successful so hopefully this has been helpful to everyone if you liked the video give us a thumbs up share it and oh yeah one other step that we do is we cover the top of the bin with another plastic bin we're going to change this system in the future we'll do a video on that but right now this helps keep the moisture in keeps it from the moisture from evaporating too fast and in one of our other previous videos we showed plastic garbage bags wrapped over this although that's working great to help keep the moisture from coming out and it condensates on the bottom of the plastic it's a little bit cumbersome so we're going to use a different system and we'll just a real quick video in case you missed it in one of the other ones this is what I was talking about we took black plastic garbage bags and you can see the worms they crawl up and go to the top or the bottom of this this plastic to get the moisture look how healthy is scooting along there and it just holds the moisture in really well we're gonna change the system a little bit we're going to still use the same concept but we're going to cut these bags up and just binder clip a sheet of plastic to the top so we're not dealing with these heavy not necessarily heavy but these bulky lids and we'll be able to reuse these bins for our outdoor system that we plan on starting and we'll have a video about that once you get it going alright guys took us about five minutes but I thought I'd go ahead and show what we were talking about with the cover on these we just took the plastic garbage bag and we took these binder clips and we held it down on the sides these tubs have nice lips on them so we're able to just clamp those and then we're opening up the ends just for airflow and so now when we go to feed water or check the bends all we have to do is just unclip these binder clips I'll be showing here fold back the plastic and there you have it there's no big plastic tub sitting on top of here anymore and we're going to see how that works we'll give you an update when we get an idea of how this is working out you [Music]

Channel: Homesteaders Discovery

Views: 46,908

Rating: 4.8956161 out of 5

Keywords: worm farming for beginners, indoor worm farm, homesteaders discovery, vermiculture, start a worm bin, feeding a worm bin, feeding worms, vegetables in a worm bin, worm bin bedding, worms as pets, pet worms, worm castings, worm compostings, how to raise worms

Id: 3xAG0l_iaVM

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019