Red Wiggler Worms for Sale in Tampa Florida

I have been vermicomposting with eisenia foetida worms aka "red wigglers" for a couple of years. My worm population has increased gradually during that time and I now have some extra worms that I would like to sell.

I am selling 1/2 lb of worms (approximately 600 worms) for $17.00 and 1 lb of worms (approximately 1,200 worms) for $30.00 to help others start their own vermicomposting programs. I'll also include a significant amount of bedding material that will help kickstart your worm bin.

To give you an idea about how effective you can be, here's an example from my own records. In the last 12 months I have reduced 350 pounds of kitchen waste, newspaper print, and cardboard that would otherwise be placed in my garbage bin, into approximately 40 pounds of worm castings which has been used in my flower beds, vegetable garden, and dead patches in my lawn. I'm reducing garbage going to landfills and increasing "greenery" around my house - with red wigglers.

For more information or to arrange pick-up please e-mail me:  tampawormcompany@gmail.com

Worms for Sale

Vermicomposting has become a major passion for me. I started composting with worms to create a soil amendment for our house plants and garden patch. It's worked well and has even allowed me to revive some plants I'd left for dead. After repotting them in a 50% vermicompost mix they're now flourishing better than ever.

I've also reduced our household waste stream by more than 50%. We use newspaper and cardboard for bedding and feed our redworms kitchen scraps (minus meat and dairy products).

These results have inspired me to tell everyone I know about the benefits a few redworms can provide for gardens and the evironment. It's also led me to provide worms for sale to anyone that is interested.

We've got African Nightcrawlers and Red Wigglers for sale. You can purchase them via PayPal in the right hand column of this screen.

We can ship year round to locations in Florida.  Availability to other zip codes may vary according to the local weather conditions.

Square Foot Gardening

Some people think it takes a lot of space to grow a garden and it might if you are planting a traditional row garden, but with a little creativity you can grow a lot in even the smallest space.

Several years ago Mel Bartholomew authored a book about Square Foot Gardening that has helped many aspiring backyard gardeners get started growing their own food.

You can built a square foot garden from wooden planks, scraps of plastic, or even vinyl fencing. Here's a picture of one built from vinyl fence scraps that might give you some ideas for building your own.

Home Composting with Red Worms

It's been 12 months since I started tracking the amount of waste my red wigglers are eating in my home worm bins.  I have other worm bins, but I've only been tracking the volume composted in my personal bins.

In case you haven't been following along as I updated the totals (see the right hand column) throughout the year, the total newsprint, cardboard, and kitchen waste has passed 320 lbs.  To put that figure in perspective, that's nearly the weight two average sized human adults.  And in case you're still not impressed, let me shed some more light on those figures.

I've put 320 lbs into the worm bins.  Assuming an 8:1 reduction ratio, that 320 lbs of garbage has been composted by my red wigglers into a resulting 40 lbs give or take of worm castings that I have used as a soil amendment in my backyard garden, in our flower beds, and in a dead patch of my front lawn. And this was achieved by a starting amount of 1 lb of red wigglers.

As a further illustration of the power of red wigglers (and why you might want to consider using them to compost your own kitchen, cardboard, and newspaper waste, suppose 10 households started a vermicomposting program like mine. Those figures above can be multiplied to 3,000 lbs of garbage and a resulting 400 lbs of worm castings. One hundred households vermicomposting their household waste multiplies to 30,000 lbs of garbage saved from the landfill. 

If you've ever wondered how you can make an impact to help improve the environment, have fun, and learn something new at the same time; I hope I've demonstrated why red wigglers might be a nice place to start.

What is SPIN Farming?

S-P-IN stands for Small Plot Intensive farming or gardening. You can use land you already have whether it's in your backyard, a friend or relatives backyard, or you can even barter with your neighbor to use theirs. You can even implement the SPIN concept if you live in an apartment.

It's all about choosing the right growing techniques, the right crops, and using a lot of ingenuity to make it all work. 

It's a whole new way of thinking about farming and about who or what a farmer is or does.  Whether you grow for your own consumption, for your relatives and friends, your church, or the local farmer's market, the possibilities are almost endless.

You can start with 500 sq ft and grow to 3,000 sq ft. Your crop quantity will grow too.

Want to learn more about SPIN? Visit the website at:  SPINFarming.com

DIY Home Hydroponics

I built a homemade DIY Deep Water Culture Hydroponic System from a plastic storage container this past weekend.  I got the idea from a You Tube video. Deep Water Culture is based on the theory of sumerging the plant roots in water containing nutrients to encourage root growth.  The water is oxygenated with an aquarium pump or ideally, a hydropnic pump specifically designed for the task.

I am using a 18 gallon container (Tuff Tote version) and six 3 inch net pots (55 cents each at Worms Way). I am using coconut coir for growing medium and some hard water liquid fertilizer also from Worms Way. I am growing 6 pepper plants.

If all goes well with this version of the experiement, I plan to switch to a more organic version of nutrient going forward. Worms Way has a large variety of seabird guano nutrient available.





The most difficult part of making this DIY system was cutting the holes.

I plan to upgrade to a better pump later, but for now I'm using an Aqua Culture pump that I had on hand. A better pump from Worms Way goes for $16.

Cheap and Easy Worm and Castings Harvesting

If you've been vermicomposting for a few months or a several years, it's likely that you've discovered separating the worms from their castings a time consuming process, if you attempt to do it by hand.

The video below offers a cheap and easy solution you can implement for you home vermicomposting efforts. I spent 99 cents on this harvester. (I told you it was cheap.)



Worms will move away from light, so a few minutes before you plan to harvest worms or castings, simply expose the top layer of your bin to light. The worms will move down away from the light and you can scrape the top layer of castings up with the kitty litter scoop.

Keep going until you are left with mostly worms in the bottom of your bin.

Worm Composting Bin Information

I made this worm bin video to demonstrate that you can make a worm bin out of almost any kind of storage bin that you may already have on hand. It's likely you have all the supplies needed.

1.  A storage bin - I used a low-profile under-the-bed plastic storage tote
2.  A drill - I drilled holes in the lid for ventiliation

3.  Newspaper - Shredded news print makes great bedding for worms

4.  Kitchen scraps - Vegetables and fruit go in the worm bin instead of the garbage bin

After a couple of months you can use the resulting worm castings to provide nutrients for houseplants, flower beds, or you can even start an above ground vegetable garden like I did.

Worm Castings for Your Plants

I'm not a soil scientist by training and I don't impersonate one on TV, but I do have a nice demonstration of the power of worm castings for growing flowering plants.

Most literature I've read about vermicompost (i.e. castings from worms), always says that it's best to use an 80% to 20% ratio of potting soil and worm castings for best resutlts.  I can't dispute that recommendation at all, but I do have an alternate example.

Here's a picture of a violet my wife purchased and repotted in a 50% to 50% mix of potting soil and worm castings. The plant was marked down from $8 to a $1 and was on it's last legs. For all purposes, it was the next thing to dead. It has flourished in the worm castings.

Maybe it would do even better in an 80% mix of potting soil and 20% mix of worm castings, but then again maybe not.  That is half the fun of vermicomposting kitchen scraps, newspaper, cardboard, and most any other organic non-dairy and non-meat product...it's interesting.  At times it can be unpredictable, but so can most everything.

Gardening Test with Worm Castings

I'm conducting a test to demonstrate the advantage of worm castings compared to regular garden soil and commonly available commercial compost.

For the test, I've planted organic Little Gem Lettuce seeds in worm castings (bottom), garden soil (middle), and commercial organic compost purchased at the local hardware store (top).

• The worm castings are fresh harvested from my home worm bin. 
• The garden soil is straight from my raised bed garden. The garden soil has been in my garden since last season. It's mixed with equal parts of coconut coir mulch, commercial organic compost, and about 1/4 part perilite. 
• The commercial compost is labeled organic compost from my local Ace Hardware.

I'll take pictures of the progress every day and post them here to aid in the comparison.

I've also planted some organic Cherry Belle Radish seeds in my garden, which should also offer an alternative comparison.

Gusanito Worm Composter

I have been using the 5 tray Gusanito Worm Composter for 18 months. If you're looking for a night looking place to keep your worms, they are a nice choice. The vertical design takes up less space than a tote-style plastic container and helps make separating the worms from the castings a little easier.

As the worms eat the food in the bottom trays they tend to migrate upwards to higher trays. As you stack on more trays, the worms will move up into the additional trays. You'll never get 100% worm castings in your lower trays, but even if you get 50%-60% castings, it's a definitely time saver.

If you are actively trying to grow your worm population, and have the "tinkering gene" like I do, it's possible that you could get 1/2 pound - 1 pound worm density in each tray giving the theoretical possibility of 3 - 5 pounds of worms in your vertical composter.

I won't guaranteee you'll be able to achieve those types of penetrations with a "set it and forget it approach", but if you actively monitor your bin, mantain a balanced ph, and keep the food source levels high without overfeeding, your chances will improve.  Add a little bit of luck, and you'll be on your way to a highly enjoyable hobby that is very good for the environment (and your houseplants).

Cheap and Easy Worm Bin Experiment

You can buy commercially distributed plastic worm bins for prices ranging from $50 - $2,500 and up.  Many people I talk to about vermicomposting suffer from worm bin sticker shock.  They get excited about the benefits of vermicomposting and get a little deflated by the prices of "store bought" worm bins.

Question: Do you really need a commercially built worm bin?

Answer: It depends.

If you've got goals of starting a commercial venture, the answer is most likely yes.  If you want to get started with the minimum amount of money, reduce landfill waste, and create soil amendments for your houseplants and vegetable garden for person use, the answer is most likely no. But ultimately, it's up to you.

To prove my point, I took a spare 5 gallon bucket taking up space in my garage, drilled some holes in the lid, and created a worm bin for free.  If you have to buy the bucket, you can buy one for less than $5.

I put 75 worms in the bucket and basically left if alone for 3 months except to check moisture and add food occasionally.  The bucket was not even 25% full of food source and bedding.

The 75 worms multiplied into 102 worms for a 36% increase in worm numbers. Not too bad, but I'll admit I was hoping for something more along the lines of a 50-60% increase. Based on the material left in the bucket and the quantity of pods I found, I'd say a 50-60% is possible (with 3 more weeks of processing time). I also was surprised at how much vermicast the bucket contained. Even 75 worms can process a lot of material!

What if you started with 500 worms instead of 75?
What if you provided a large quantity of nutrients for your "worm workers"?
What if you aerated the bucket weekly (by hand) to help things along?

My most recent experiment with 5 gallon buckets is to layer the bedding and food source as follows:

• First layer of cardboard.
• Second layer of aged rabbit manure.
• Next layer of shredded newspaper.
• Next layer of aged rabbit manure.
• Next layer of cardboard.
• Last layer of aged rabbit manure

Stay tuned to see how it works.

Vermicompost Details

This award winning video is without a doubt the best explanation of the benefits of vermicomposting that I've seen to date. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks to Cornell University for sharing this information.

Worm Castings

I spent the afternoon at a local community festival.

A lady stopped by the booth to speak to my wife and the talk turned to vermicomposting.  She was telling us about a friend of hers that raises orchids.  She said he'd always had good luck growing orchids, but since he started using worm castings and worm tea, his orchids have exploded with growth.

As anyone who has tried to grow orchids and other tropical plants can attest, it's hard enough to keep finicky plants happy. Sometimes moving them from one side of the room to the other can make all the difference in keeping them alive or having them wither-up and expire. 

Vermicompost and tea may not guarantee your success, but it will definitely improve your chances of having full, healthy, and thriving plant material.

5 Gallon Bucket Worm Bins - Round 2

For those that haven't seen my original posts about the 5 gallon bucket experiment(s), here's a link to those posts which should bring you up to date. The buckets make very inexpensive, but effective worm bins.

It's been 5 days since I separated the worms from the buckets. I placed them in a 64 Quart plastic holding bin that I use for various purposes including local sharing and my really-small- time sales initiatives. It's the kind of plastic bin that fits under a bed for storage.

You may recall from my recent post that the worms were very tiny, though large in numbers.

I added about 2 gallons of pre-composted rabbit manure from an outside bin Sunday evening and a little more on Monday night, but I have that has been sitting for about 2 weeks. And haven't really looked at the bin since Sunday....until about 20 minutes ago.

All those tiny worms are having a feast! It's a major worm party out in the garage right now. That inspired me to start some more buckets. Actually I had already planned it, but that helped nudge me into doing it today.

I prepped the buckets with a lot of cardboard on the bottom (much more than the first time). I added about a quart of rabbit manure from my outside bin and about 100-150 EFs to each bucket. I didn't count them, but my estimate should be pretty close. These worms were all breeders.

I covered everything up with shredded newspaper and newspaper torn into long strips. I am hoping that the various sizes of material I used including big cardboard, small cardboard, shredded newspaper, and torn newspaper will help improve on the quality of bedding I ended up with last time. I plan to add large and small pieces of cardboard as needed to keep things aerated better than last time.

I am using much more food source to start and I'm going to be adding more food source than in my previous experiment. Last time I took a hand off approach, but this time I'm going to keep much more food in the buckets. Checking on them weekly should suffice.

Last time I added small amounts of rabbit manure, paper, and food scraps. This time it's only going to be lots of rabbit manure for food and I'm going to keep the bedding material more plentiful too. I'll try to keep the two buckets relatively the same.

I've got two more buckets handy, and if these two buckets progress well for a few days, I'm going to set up the other two buckets with a 1/2 lb of worms each and add 1/2 lb to these first two (2 lbs total in 4 buckets).

I'm still experimenting, but I think 1/2 lb of worms might be the "right" amount for 5 gallon buckets the way I'm trying to do it.

I'll end this by saying that I ended the last experiment a little disappointed, but I've definitely perked back up today regarding the potential of drastically increasing worm supply with 5 gallon buckets and a holding bin.