Wigglers not wiggling....

Today, I went to my bin of worms to check on them only to find them well, stationary. They are normally active worms.

Last week I was preparing to feed them and opened the bin. Everyone was moving and happy then I noticed......ugh.......maggots. So I rescued my babies, cleaned out their bin and laid a new layers of nice, moist bedding for them. I cannot deal with maggots very well, especially since we keep the worms inside. So I decided to take a couple of scoops of my husbands cow manure compost, for them to eat, instead of mulched leftovers.

I do not know what I did wrong or how I can fix it. I have had several people tell me that they THRIVE on manure. Any advice will help and be greatly respected. Thank you all so much!

Mama, it sounds like your indoor bin is a bit overworked. Flies are somehow getting access to the worm food and laying eggs which are probably the cause of the maggots. If you have excess food on the surface of your indoor bin, covering with composted cow manure should help. I have four indoor bins just for the two of us and right now with all the excess food from harvesting I have started a new outdoor bin with composted cow manure and lots of garden refuse: Beet, carrot and cabbage leaves; potato, apple, and tomato peels; and the list goes on. Trying to feed all this excess to the indoor bins doesn't work very well.

Red wigglers can appear in manure piles on their own in your zone. I used to live in Augusta, GA. It's Zone 8, I think., we dug our fish bait red wigglers from a lady's chicken house cleanings - uggh! Composted cow manure shouldn't be a problem but I think you will still want to give your worms some chopped up veggies, maybe a little coffee grounds. Just don't feed so much for a while.

I have composted fresh horse manure with harvest scraps for several years and red wigglers somehow manage to stay even in the empty bins. One sunken raised bed how has some aged cow manure which was treated with all kinds of scraps from last years harvest and it is loaded with red wigglers even though I didn't place any in the bin to my knowledge. I had placed the remains of a bunch of European night crawlers in this bin after they didn't fare so well in the peat moss media, indoor bins. More than likely migrated from an adjacent raised bed which had spent vermiculture media in the transferred potted up plants. Interested thing is we found three of the European night crawlers in the garden as much as fifty feet away from the raised bed they had been placed in. I would really like to see some Europeans in the garden come next spring when I till.

Question for you pbyrley. I presume you used those red wigglers as bait for sunfish or brem, or perch as you may call them. I have never caught anything but yellow perch on them here in Montana. Trout will not touch them. I taught my kids how to fish when they were three or younger, catching sunfish with a cork loop method which later on was used to catch white bass fishing from a dam. That cork loop method would catch four or five times as many white bass as others were catching and soon caught on in the place we lived at the time. Now I am doing this with my grand kids in those trout fish out places using a weighted cork and a morgan's raider on the other tagged end. People still can't believe the results. Didn't mean to get carried away here...just a side note. Us old f...ts do that sort of thing.

morgan

Morgan, that was interesting but I don't know what the cork loop method is.

I was 6 or so years old when we dug the red worms and I believe we caught bream with them but maybe never caught anything (except fish pond minnows that were there to keep mosquito larva in check). The minnows would bite the end of the worm and we could flip them out. No fish hook was needed for the minnows.

I'm glad to know fresh hose manure won't kill the worms. I was planning to go get some soon.

Paul

Paul it takes a while to break down horse manure. I placed it in a 4' 8' bin next to the house. The depth was about 40" and I completely filled the bin, watered well, and covered the top with a frame made from 1" x 4" lumber and 14ml plastic sheeting (from painters drop cloth). Heat from the foundation of the house kept the bin from completely freezing. Whenever the weather allowed I used a potato fork to turn the bin. I added an outdoor hot water faucet so I could water the bin with warm water even in the winter months when the top of the bin froze over. Turning the pile two or three times a week really helped the process along. Once completed the composted horse manure was very granular and easy to use. As long as the pile stays moist the worms will do their thing. Some even doubled in size from the small dark red worms which were originally taken from a leaf pile. When placed in holes in my garden for tomatoes, cucumbers and squash these worms would eventually revert back the 1.5-2" size and dark red color.

The cork loop method Paul is simply made by tying a loop about four feet in diameter at the end of you fishing line and cutting it at the bottom. You now have two tagged ends of equal distance from the knot. We tied a 1.25" round cork with a lead shister lure weight lodged in the center hole to one tagged end, and the hook to the other tagged end. The kids could feel the fish take the bait even before the cork bobbed. It also helped them to cast a good distance. Later we tied a morgan's raider on the tagged end where the hook went and they would catch white bass in season. They were catching fish faster than we could remove them from the raider and place them on a string.

Our four kids made a business of making the morgan's raiders which were sold under private label in small zip lock bags for promotions and convention hand outs. They were making 10,000 lures a year and good money through their junior and high school years. I still use the cork loop method to train my grandkids to fish. They love it too. Although they don't make lures any longer we have lots of them left for give-a-ways which will last for many years.

morgan