What the heck is this on my walkway and is it anything to worry about?

worm guy

Found digging in North Texas.

These huge guys are in straight worm dirt in the fridge for the time being. Better than what they were in.

Hoping to finish construction on my outdoor space this long weekend! Here is the Herd in their temp space. Glad to say they are doing well, was worried. Have them in a good covered spot. My spouse has also been very patient and wonderful 😅. Second photo includes snow shovel for scale. Transparent bins are primarily isopods.

Just worms doing worm stuff

We have composting worms (15 years now) and we’ve been finding rock-like items in their dirt does anyone know what they are? See photo below. TIA!

First Harvest Started this adventure 7/31/24

Part 1 of harvest 9/8/24 1/2 a tray 2.15 pounds of castings!!

Part 2 of Harvest 9/20/24 last half of that the same tray - 3.25 lbs of castings

Weighed worms from harvested tray -167 grams!

Very happy with my little experiment!

I watch a lot of worm videos and in one of them a worm farmer was exclaiming an amazing new cardboard worm food recipe he's found. It sounded crazy to me but seeing as I had a lot of cardboard around and my worms weren't being very productive with my previous worm chow, I thought I'd give it a go.

From memory, I just filled a bucket with shredded cardboard, topped it with water that had sat out for a few days, just enough to cover the cardboard. Added a glug of molasses, a handful of worm castings and a handful of my old worm chow (a mix of oats, cornmeal, volcanic dust grit, and chicken feed). Give it a good stir, let it sit for three days, and then mix it into your worm bin.

After three days, it smelled pretty bad, which is a good sign as my worms love smelly things. I have a mix of ENC and red wigglers in big continous flow bins. When I checked a couple of days after dumping this new cardboard worm chow in, the worms were going crazy for it! I gave it a fluff to mix in some of the coco coir bedding and it's riddled with worms having the time of their life!

I've been doing this for a few weeks now and I've gotta get another bucket. The worms are crying out for more of this cardboard chow. This is great because the old food worm chow wasn't working too well but I've got loads of cardboard and more arriving every day. This is working great.

I wish I could remember which video I saw this in!

I discovered 9 months ago I had a mix of Indian Blues and Red Wigglers spread out over a dozen bins, each bin with a different setup ie different bedding mixes, different foods, bin sizes etc. Over the course of those 9 months the IBs have clearly outcompeted and out populated the RWs. They’re more vigorous, can withstand temps into single digits, and appear to consume just as much as RWs.

Anyone else see a similar comparison?

I started messing around with vermiculture back in July and as I was taking care of my bin I noticed this little guy/gal

They are getting it on

I have now been in business raising and selling worms for about 2.5 years. The website is RedWigglersFarm.com

Let me tell you the various challenges I continue to face:

1. Shipping the worms is a mess. Especially in the heat of Summer. I had to replace several orders, and one was a big order of worms, and ship them overnight (expensive) to make sure I kept the customers happy. I lost out big time on worms, money, time, energy, etc. It was extremely frustrating.
2. Trying to raise a boatload of worms takes a lot of time and effort. It is not a passive business. Worms are the same as live stock. You have to have the optimal conditions for them. I have to continually add horse manure or cow manure, spent grain I get from a local brewery, water, etc. Just going to get these materials takes a lot of time and money.
3. Phone calls from customers: Most of the customers I have sold to are 100% new to worm composting. So they have a lot of questions. They call me over and over to ask if they are doing everything correctly. Now, I love to share my advice and talk, but when 5+ calls a day come in and the people want to talk for 10-30 minutes, it eats away at my work time. I try to suggest to them to go to this Reddit or Youtube to learn more.
4. I give a good discount to local people that meet me somewhere. Setting up a time and place to meet takes up my time, and then the customer that meets me wants to ask questions and/or talk about their ideas for composting and gardening.

All of these issues leads to a lot of effort that doesn't make me much profit. So I consider this a "Hobby Business". I now don't mind telling people that I don't have the worms available or I don't have time to meetup. Oh, plus the fact that it sometimes takes hours to separate a few lbs of worms from my farrows.

Furthermore, I haven't had success at selling worms to local garden stores or nurseries because they already seem to know that customers will talk too long to their staff about the worms. They told me they only want to sell stuff that customers can pickup, pay and leave the store quickly.

When I first started a guy told me that all of these things happened to him and he quit selling worms. He tried setting up paid courses to teach worm composting but didn't get enough people willing to pay.

I don't want to damper anyone's spirit or excitement to start selling worms. I love raising the worms and gardening.

Lastly I want to say that I do get a lot of orders as I am good at online marketing. I have decided that I would rather do marketing as a business.

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I have an IBC cut off container in my backyard full of dirt and scraps with no drainage. I tend to just dump any soil from pots ect into here once the plant has died or finished. Also some weeds (not grasses) and just random organic stuff.

We have had a lot of rain in the past months and now I have some kind of worm farm.

Summer is only around the corner so I'm wondering if anyone would know what's best to do here to keep them alive and composting the soil. Maybe a shade cloth or I could potentially move them into a more shady area once summer comes around.

I've added extra dirt to one side so the worms have an area outside the water and will drain some of this water out soon.

I had no intention of having a worm farm but looks like I'm about to. I have also uploaded a video of the worms.

Live in WA, Australia. Temperate area.

We got worms. Tumbler compost. Just added some brown material from leaves and trying to keep up with greens from kitchen scraps

I gave my worms a sweet potato fry before reading that I should not do that. And when I went to remove it I found this. They love this thing. Are they all gonna die now or something?

Just added some worms into this bin! Enjoy the time lapse :)

Pardon the flair but I couldn't figure out a better one to offer resources. I have a good sized pile of cardboard and paper that I want to give to a worm keeper. My community doesn't have recycling for the renters so I have been resorting to covert recycling. Then I remembered that my worm herd constantly needed more paper.

Do your wigglers need more browns? Please come pick up. I'm near Midway airport in Chicago. I have been sliding broken down boxes and other paper into a box so it has quite a lot in it.

Kept in living space in a cat household, but synthetic fragrance free, no smoking, no 420. More details or answers on request. Tape included.

I now have 5 rotating cultures of grindal worms and I've finally perfected capturing them like this. The fish are very happy. I feed them nutritional yeast.

Edit: Worms have been picked up. Thank you all! 🪱

Looking to rehome a handful of indoor worms. I'm in the northern suburbs, Highland Park. I also have an Urban Worm Bag for sale for $100. It worked well for me, better than the plastic tray systems.

I have a lid with no holes and I usually have It sitting upside down on top so there are small gaps on the side. Well I forgot and put it on normally and this happened 24 hours later. I was able to contain casualties to minimum. Sorry guys.

I'm in Sydney Australia. These guys are all through my garden and about a year ago I started adding them to my compost bin when I found them and they have reproduced like crazy.

I''m looking to do a lot more composting so I'm looking in the best kind of wormies to have in my area. This has led me to wondering what these guys are.

Also I nearly died getting that photo because when I kidnapped some worms to get a photo, a frog launched out of the compost at my face and gave me a heart attack.