Interview: Earthworm orgies and ignoring your worms
This is the second part of my interview with Michael. Feel free to peruse the first part.
Dan: Ok, so you mentioned earlier like you had more plans for the worms next year. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?
Michael: Well I don’t have too many plans for the worms, just I wanted to get some of the castings out of there and then offer worms to other people or kind of transfer ‘em to our compost piles or possibly garden beds if we’re doing different things like that. I like the idea of worm bins and I like the idea of having lots of worms all over the place.
D: Sure.
M: We have a really healthy worm population in the backyard.
D: Really?
M: Yeah. Which I didn’t necessarily think we would because it’s really pretty dense clay soil up there. But I started really early, kind of like early April irrigating really heavily out there after I tilled it once, about a quarter acre I tilled, and then I just started watering, just watering it all the time.
D: Every day or every other day?
M: Yeah about every other day; just leaving it or letting the water run for 12 hours or something.
D: Ok.
M: Use the sprinklers and just really, really water the hell out of it. Cause it was really hard packed stuff. And what I noticed was that the more I watered it and the more water I put into the soil there, the more worms would come. So what I would do is I would go out at night time, say 11 o’clock at night and I was doing this really consistently for a few weeks.
D: Cool.
M: Like every night I would go out there with my headlamp and I’d be doing my watering at night because I had a job where I’d be at work till like 10 o’clock at night I would come home and do all my irrigation.
D: Ok.
M: At that point I was out there at night a lot which is a really interesting time to observe the garden. Cause the worms are all out.
D: Interesting.
M: Especially after watering because they would come up out of the soil to get away from the water table because it rises. They’re not regular worms like we have in the compost bin but they’re the big, long, thick, fat earthworms.
D: Ok.
M: The night crawlers. And it was like a night crawler orgy there.
D: Wow.
M: I mean you would go around there would just be dozens of couples of worms, because you know they’re asexual or whatever and…
D: Don’t they have both?
M: Yeah, both parts.
D: Hermaphroditic.
M: Yeah whatever you call it, maybe it’s not asexual but they have both male and female parts and when you see them mate they actually don’t really mate with themselves, they rub their female part against the male part of another one and then the male part rubs up against their female part or whatever.
D: Wow.
M: And so, yeah, you see ‘em all over the place out there. And I would just go out there and check them all out.
D: Wow.
M: There’s a lot of worms out there and I think it had to do with me watering it early in the season heavily, because I think, I read that the worms are attracted to water.
D: Interesting.
M: And they come to the water, to be around the water.
D: Interesting, interesting. Did you apply any like organic material out there, or till in any organic material?
M: I guess I mowed it then let that mulch sit down then tilled that in and I put a few truckloads in, I went to Haystack goat dairy and got a few truck loads of goat manure and I bought like a truckload of finished compost from one of the landscaping companies around here or one of the agriculture companies. I did use one chemical, I used ammonium sulfate back there, early on. I spread that out.
D: I just wonder whether the like enhanced organic material was another reason for the night crawlers coming out there. I don’t know much about night crawlers.
M: They were out there I don’t know why. I didn’t put ‘em there, they were there.
D: Don’t ask questions, right? So do you want to spread the worms elsewhere? You said your compost pile…
M: Or I don’t know I haven’t really thought about it too much to be honest. The worms have just been a real side project around here.
D: Sure. That’s the great thing about worms.
M: You don’t have to do much.
D: Yeah, exactly; feed it once every couple of weeks and make sure that they have… I mean it sounds like you didn’t even water the box.
M: Well, I did do that.
D: Oh, you did?
M: There’s spigots right next to the box. Whenever I would throw any bedding in there, I would hose it down to get it wet.
D: Ok.
M: But I’ve done that a few times, I’ve thrown additional sawdust, or additional shredded paper.
D: Oh really, ok. So just for bedding. What, you know, maybe once every couple of weeks or?
M: No, like once every 2 months or something like that. And like you pointed out, they’re [probably in their waste. It] would probably be helpful [to harvest], it is pretty black down there. I don’t know.
D: When John came and sold us on it, I was kind of astonished because that was pretty processed [castings] and I understand why he sold a 5 gallon bucket [of worms], because separating out worms is tedious. When I bought my worms, [the package they came in was] 5” by 5” and it was solid worms.
M: Did you get it through the mail or something?
D: I did get them through the mail. Yeah I got them through the Worm Lady, somebody in Michigan.
M: Right, I had a friend who set up a worm box at home and she ordered them through the mail.
D: Yeah and it works real well but there probably were about the same number of worms in John’s 5 gallon bucket and the pound of worms that I got. So I was interested that he was selling the big old one cheaper than the pound of worms cause of the labor involved.
M: This [the five gallon bucket of worms] was like $35.
D: Was it $35? I thought the bucket was more like $15 or $10 but, I didn’t buy it.
M: No, it’s definitely not $15 or $10. I think it was $30 for the 5 gallon bucket.
D: Ok, well, maybe that was more because [my box of worms] was $20 plus shipping for 1 pound of worms a couple of years ago.
M: Yeah. I remember John saying it was hard to buy worms now a lot of those mail order worm places don’t have any worms to sell because they’ve sold all of ‘em.
D: Really?
M: Yeah, that’s what he was saying during the class because they’re so popular right now.
…
Next up: worms and permaculture, bees, advice for aspiring worm keepers, and plans for next year.
Add comment March 17th, 2009
