Composting with worms is a great way to make free fertilizer. Diverting unwanted food scraps from the landfill helps save the environment. And vermicomposting is a fun hobby for all ages. But where can you get enough free worm food for volume composting? For many households, the scraps generated in the kitchen are enough. They make sufficient quantities of compost without finding more worm food. Gardeners and lawn enthusiasts need enough completed compost to nourish their plants. The composting worms are happy to oblige, and they will eat through a typical household kitchen’s scraps. However,
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Finding the Right Mix of Food for Your Composting Worms
Composting worms will produce nutrient-rich fertilizer for your garden, but you need to feed them right. This is not difficult. Treat these invertebrates like little living creatures – which they are! Worms have likes and dislikes. Putting the right mix of food into your vermicomposting bin helps them do their job: turn trash into treasure. Let’s start with what composting worms dislike. They don’t like an acidic environment. Whatever you add to the worm bin becomes part of their environment. So, do not add acidic foods such as:
Read MoreFishing Worms and Rabbits: A Match Made in Heaven?
If you want to integrate worm farming with your rabbit operation, have a look at the classic, Raising Fishworms with Rabbits, by Howard “Lucky” Mays. First published in 1976, this little manual is two parts valuable instruction and one part personal anecdotes. Mays tells the story of how he got started with rabbits and worms and gives lots of valuable tips on everything from finding rabbit stock to recognizing problems in your worm bin. Mays started out with $5 borrowed from the grocery money, and in the end he has a barn with several hundred rabbits. You might think that many rabbits would stink, but thanks to the composting worms, his barn is odorless, even when closed up for the winter. Worms as a Waste Disposal Solution Gardeners think of rabbit manure as a “cool” manure, and some use it directly on their plants. But manure is not the only waste product your rabbits are generating. There’s also their used nesting material, their urine, and their spilled feed — not to mention the flies that will eventually find their way to this mess. Taken together, you’ve got a hot and stinky waste disposal problem! Proper composting turns that problem into an opportunity. The nitrogen from the urine and the feed combines with the carbon from the bedding and other organic matter, and over time a lovely fertilizer results. This fertilizer can be sold or used on your own plants. Mays takes it one step further and adds worms to the …
Read MorePet Rabbits – A Worm’s Best Friend
Rabbit droppings are small, relatively dry and don’t contain too much nitrogen, which can spoil plant roots. Although new rabbit manure is considered great plant fertilizer, many rabbit growers choose to put earthworms under their rabbit cages. Why? Rabbit manure along with wasted rabbit feed has been proved to be some of the best food a worm can eat. Also, when properly cared for, earthworms eliminate manure piles, odor, and fly problems all together. For this reason alone, rabbits and worms make a great team. Rabbits are a worm’s best friend. Making Simple Compost with Earthworms To set up your earthworms for an optimal place to feed, you will want to have them underneath your rabbits cage. The best earthworm that I have found is redworms. Ideally, you should have 250-550 worms per square foot. Worms will do a terrific job eliminating the rabbit poop and wasted feed into dark, nutrient-rich, finely textured humus. In addition, keeping worms under the cages allows you to raise worms for fishing bait and worm castings for your garden. This ecosystem that you are creating with worms and rabbits creates a fantastic number of uses for catching fish and feeding gardens – all part of eating organically grown food. Creating a Rabbit and Earthworm Ecosystem Underneath the rabbit hutch you can build a wood frame around the worm bed. This should be about 12 inches deep. The rabbit hutch should be 3 feet above the ground. A half inch wire mesh floor should be …
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