Since starting this project with the wormbeds, I have really had two goals in mind, increasing the herd size and turning the bedding to castings as quickly as possible. I believe that I have stumbled onto the most efficient feeding technique to achieve both goals. With the start of my current production run, I am now taking my ground slurry and pressure cooking it to hydrolyze it, then mixing it into water and saturating the 1/4 in bedding from the shredder. This way, instead of the stock traveling through the bedding to the food, the bedding is the food. With this in mind, it should speed up the conversion of the bedding to castings. Other potential benifits should be that feedings can be reduced to basicly the initial saturation of the bedding and this should keep the worms more seditary, increasing reproductive potentials. The only addition that I intend to add to the "feed bedding" is a little manure tea or tea from rabbit urine soaked straw to assist in maintaining higher medium temps and providing the neccessary components to increase nitrogen levels. Let y'all how it turns out.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), February 19, 2001

Answers

An addition to the above post. While setting up to try the pressure cooking of the slurry, it occurred to me that while this will break down the mix for saturating the bedding, it may also reduce the nutritional value through the cooking process. I am still going to try it , but I am also going to try cold processing the mix using a blender. This will give us two test groups to compare results from.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), February 19, 2001.

Jay:

You might consider going to a feed store and buying a bag of livestock pasture minerals. Sprinkle some on your new bedding so the worms have access to the minerals in it.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), February 19, 2001.

I've never pressure cooked anything for my worms but I have used an old blender container (kept separate from the one for our food!) to puree' scraps for them. It does hasten the utilization but it didn't seem so much that it was worth washing the blender container each time I had scraps for the worms. I'm not shooting for a commercial operation though, just compost/casting tea for my houseplants and seed starting mixtures. Now that I have chickens in competition for the scraps, slow utilization seems a plus.

-- marilyn (rainbow@ktis.net), February 19, 2001.