No related products were found for this product. Do you raise chickens? Are you looking to lower your food bill while also providing top quality food for your poultry flock? Do you have a pile of chicken manure that you don’t know what to do with? I have the solution and it’s called the Soldier Grub.
Soldier Grubs are the larvae of the Black Soldier Fly. They adult is a wasp-looking thing that does not sting but does looks scary at first sight. The are a purplish black and naturally inhabit many states in the U.S. but are in abundance in the South East.
Soldier Grubs are great composting creatures. If you have enough of them they will devour all of the food you provide for them. They are fond of Human food scraps just like compost worms or Red Worms but they also do something that regular composting worms don’t and can’t do; The can eat chicken manure while it is still fresh. Soldier Grubs will turn that fresh chicken manure, which is usually a problem for many people who have a flock of chickens. The manure smells, attracts flies and needs to sit for a while prior to being used in gardening.
Soldier Grubs will eat that manure and turn it into usable castings in a matter of days not months. The larvae crowd out other larvae like that of flies which can be a nuisance. The Black Soldier Flies will emerge and fly off but not before laying more eggs in fresh manure to keep the cycle going. They do not carry any disease dangerous to Humans that we know of so they are not disease vectors like flies are.
Now for the best part…Soldier Grubs can be fed back to the chickens and they will thrive on them. Soldier Grubs contain protein and calcium and other vitamins and minerals that chickens needs to stay healthy and make eggs.
So now you get the full picture. Soldier Grubs will eat chicken manure turning it into garden fertilizer and then you can feed the larvae to the chickens to supplement food costs and to provide much needed nutrients and calcium.
We haven’t found a downside yet.
You can get Soldier Grubs at Wormman.com, SoldierGrubs.com or other participating retailers.
Compost naturally heats up when it is piled high with food scaps, livestock poop, peat moss and straw. It can get so hot that it steams in the dead of winter.
What causes that heat in the first place? We investigated and have some answers for you.
The heat generated by compost is actually caused by the microbial breakdown of organic material. The amount of heat generated and the time it takes to get past the heating stage varies based upon a number of things:
1. How large the pile is.
2. Outside temperatures
3. What the carbon to nitrogen ratio is. This is not as complicated as it sounds. Carbon is the brown stuff used in a worm bin and nitrogen is the green stuff like grass clipping used in your pile.
The perfect ratio of carbon to nitrogen should be approximately 27-1, meaning 27 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. I’ve listed some common compost pile ingredients and their carbon to nitrogen ratios.
The best thing to do is balance as best you can to attain that 27 to 1 ratio.
High C:N ratios can be decreased by adding grass clippings or manures. Low C:N ratios may be increased by adding paper, straw or peat moss.
| High Carbon or Brown stuff |
C:N |
| Fruit and fruit peels and stuff | 25:1 |
| Shredded Cardboard | 350:1 |
| Corn stalks | 75:1 |
| Ashes, wood | 35:1 |
| Leaves | 60:1 |
| Shredded newspaper | 175:1 |
| Peanut shells | 35:1 |
| Pine needles | 80:1 |
| Sawdust | 325:1 |
| Straw | 75:1 |
| Wood chips | 400:1 |
| High Nitrogen Green Stuff |
C:N |
| Garden waste | 12:1 |
| Clover | 23:1 |
| Grass clippings | 20:1 |
| Food waste | 20:1 |
| Alfalfa | 30:1 |
| Coffee grounds | 20:1 |
| Hay | 25:1 |
| Horse, Rabbit and Cow Manure | 15:1 |
| Seaweed | 19:1 |
| Vegetable scraps | 25:1 |
| Weeds | 30:1 |
I receive emails every week asking about different types of poop and which is best for castings which will be used in a vegetable garden.
The best poop for worm composting are horse manure, cow manure, and rabbit manure. If you have access to the manure listed above then you are in luck. The manure should be mixed 50/50 with peat moss. Horse and cow manure should be moistened and allowed to heat first so that it does not heat in the worm bed. Moistening it and allowing it to sit for a week should do it. Then mix 50/50 with peat and let it sit again for a couple of days to ensure the peat does not activate heating in the worm bed.
Rabbit manure can be used fresh from the bunny. Just make sure it hasn’t been soaking in urine first. If so, then wash out with water first before top feeding your worm bed.
Dog poop, cat poop and human poop should not be used. The poop listed can contain pathogens which are harmful to people. If you later use the castings on vegetables you may be poisoning yourself and your family. Dog, cat and Human poop also may contain heavy metals which will build up in the soil after continuous composting.
Chicken manure can be composting and used as worm food but only after being watered and left to cook. Cooking chicken manure means allowing it to age and degrade so that the acids wash out.
Chicken manure can be composted well if you use Black Solider Fly Larva. If you decide to compost with Black Soldier Fly Larvae you can use the chicken manure fresh. This is the only time fresh chicken poop should be used.
We take the chicken poop and mix it with straw and peat and wet down the pile. We stir the pile every three days and keep it moist. When the straw snaps when bent then the mixture is ready for the worms.
Horse and Cow poop can be used after a short period of aging unless the animals have recently been wormed or given antibiotics. Do not use manure from treated animals for a week after treating the animal. If you use the manure you risk passing the drugs to your worms which could kill them.
Worms turn poop into gold for gardeners.
That’s the poop on poop. Any questions? LOL!
Posted in Animals, Bait Worms, Composting, Red Worms, Vermicomposting and Worm Business | 
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I get many questions about how often to water worm beds during throughout the year.
1. If you have a bed that has good drainage then I suggest watering daily if it isn’t raining
2. If it is cold and the ground is frozen I would only water weekly when the ground is not frozen. If you fed and watered your bed prior to the first freeze then leave the worms alone. They are fine.
3. Worm bins are a different story. Plastic bins or bins with poor drainage should not be watered until until they dry out a bit. If the bedding is damp but not wet and you can’t squeeze out a couple drops out of the worm bedding then it is time to water your worms.
If you are using big beds and want to grow commercially then watering daily is important for optimal growth.
It is getting warm outside and it is breeding season for flies. It is always breeding season for flies but it is super-breeding season for flies right now. Every type of nasty fly and gnat is attracted to your compost pile.
This is one of the worst parts of composting with worms. The flies lay eggs in the food you placed in the compost bin or bed and more flies are born.
A very simple remedy is to bury the food. Place the scraps a couple of inches beneath the bedding and use a new location each time you add more scraps. The flies can’t burrow and need to touch the food to lay eggs in it. This will mean more food for your worms and many fewer flies.
I’ve read a great deal about how red worms(Esenia Fetida) are not good enough to be used a a bait worm. I disagree. Red Worms (Esenia Fetida) are a great bait worm and they are easy to grow and can be quite attractive to fish if you fatten them up with the right fattener.
If you pull a red worm right out of a pile of manure it might not be too tempting to fish, but if you fatten it with a homemade fattener that I’m going to show you how to make then the fish will coming biting and you be a happy camper…or fisherman.
Worm fattener does exactly what it sounds like it does, it fattens worms but it also changes the taste of the worms in such a way that fish actually find them more attractive when used as bait.
This is what you will need:
Chicken Food Egg Laying Pellets-
Pellets are better than the powdered stuff because the powdered stuff usually has chunks of corn that are not broken down enough. The pellets are reduced to a powder and then formed into pellets.
Powdered Milk
Wheat or Rice Bran
Wheat Flour
Agricultural Lime
Rabbit Pellets (alfalfa pellets)
Get a big bowl or pot
Mix in 5 Parts of the chicken food.
Add 2 parts of rice or wheat bran
Add one part of each of the other ingredients.
To simplify, If you add 5 cups of chicken food then you will add 2 cups of wheat bran and 1 cup of each of the other ingredients.
You can mix these together and use them dry on the fattening beds. A fattening bed is a bed of adult worms that you wish to fatten.
Moisten the bed first and then add the food dry to the top.
You can also use a blender and blend all of the mixed ingredients into a fine powder that you sprinkle over the bed.
Another way is to moisten the mixture and feed the worms by laying patties of the fattener on top of the bed. Cover the top of the bed with some landscaping cloth and the worms will come up and eat themselves into fat bait worms.
Enjoy you fishing. I’d like to hear from you if you have other fattener recipes or if you use this one.
Thanks for stopping in.
Ken
Over the past several weeks we’ve experienced a deep freeze like we have not experienced in 20 years. It has been very cold and this is threatening our worm beds. We’ve taken some emergency measures that have brought us through the deep freeze so far. I just wanted to share it with all of you because you may be experiencing the same thing.
We have many outdoor worm beds that are approximately 100 feet long each. We dig the beds so that we have a portion of the bed beneath the freeze line her in New Jersey. We do this so that the worms can retreat during a deep freeze, ball up together and stay warm until the beds thaw. We usually spray the beds with water prior to the first freeze. We do that to allow the top layer to freeze forming a hard cover of ice which allows the bed beneath the ice to remain protected. It will take very cold weather to freeze the layer beneath the ice shield. We’ll we received that very cold weather and I began to fear for the worm cocoon, baby worms and breeders.
I decided to heat the beds naturally. We did this by doing something we would never do during warm weather. We allowed our green manures to mix and heat in the worm beds. I took bales of straw and soaked them until they were mushy. It took two days. I also gathered up all of the horse and rabbit manure we could get. We ued the fresh stuff.
We usually mix the manure and straw together, wet it down and heat and then only use the mixture after it is through the heating process. We do this to protect the worms. For our warming project we dug trenches down the center of the worm beds and put a layer of straw down (don’t use hay or you may have hay growing in your worm beds when the weather warms), we put a layer of manure down and then a layer of shredded newspaper and mealworm frass from our mealworm beds. This is a powder from the bran we use to fed our mealworms. It is rich in nitrogen and heats when wet quickly. We created three levels by alternating the ingredients listed. Then we watered the beds with water brought to the beds in buckets because the hoses froze.
We covered the beds with landscaping fabric and secured it. Two days later we had temps of 80 degrees in the center of our beds and the worms were swarming like they do in spring. We’ve added manure and straw weekly to extend the heating. a month has gone by now and the center of the bed is still reading 60 degrees. The outer edges are cold and frozen in spots but the center remains warm and healthy. The weather is supposed to warm into the 30′s and 40′s this week which is normal for this time of the year so we will scale back on the heating measures and we will watch the weather closely.
The good news is that the worms look great and untouched by the killer cold snap here. The bad news is that we have to keep a close eye now. We had eggs hatch and we have a swarm of babies that we usually only get during spring and in our indoor beds. If a freeze catches us unaware the baby worms may be killed. We will have to continue warming the beds through spring now. I had thought to use soil warming cables but decided to try a natural method instead.
I’ll let you know how this effects our spring harvest which is a majorly important part of our business.
How do you keep your beds warm? Any ideas?
I get many questions from people who want to produce worm castings for houseplants or for spring gardens but who live in cold climates. They ask if they can compost indoors year round without getting fly and gnat infestations in their compost bins and without using stinky manure.
The answer is a big YES. You can composting in your house and you can do it without smells and pests if you do it right.
Supplies you will need:
1. 12 Gallon plastic storage bin with a lid.
2. Drill
3. Dry Newspapers
4. 5 cups of peat moss or coir bedding.
5. 2 cups of garden soil (for grit and microbes.
6. 250 to 500 red worms
7. Food Scraps.
Drill holes around the upper rim of the bin for air and also drill holes in the lid. Just drill all you want to create good air flow.
Rip newspaper into strips and then soak the strips until they are soaked.
Soak the peat and then squeeze the peat until it is just moist but not dripping wet.
Mix the peat and the newspapers together and add the garden soil to the mixture.
Add the food scraps to the mixture in the bin and burry them beneath the bedding.
Add the worms and place the lid on the bin.
That’s it. As you generate food scraps bury them in the bin to eliminate odors and to stop flies and gnats from getting at the food and laying eggs.
After 30 days or so you should check the worms to see if it is swarming with baby worms. When you see baby worms remove the breeders you started with and start a second bin.
Stop feeding the babies in the first bin and let them eat all of the food as they grow. When you no longer see visible food and when the bedding is sand-like you can harvest the worms from the first bed and use the castings for your plants. Use the worms to start new beds. You should have plenty of worms by then to start a couple of bins.
Please write with your questions. There are so many variations on how you can harvest and feed that I want to cover them but I don’t want to drone on and on in this post. Thanks!
Ken
2009 was one of the worst years of my life. I spent New Year’s Eve and the first day of 2009 living in my unheated and non- insulated shed. I had a fight with my wife on New Year’s Eve and left the house instead of fighting. Three days later my dog died. Two days after that my wife’s van died. The nation’s economy hit the skids and my business started the long road down. Bad news started on day one of 2009 and didn’t start to turn around until about November. I know…too much information. “TMI” as my kids say.
I type this today as I sit in my house next to a roaring fire and a loving wife. My kids are playing nicely in the other room and all is well in 2010 so far. I hope this is a taste of what 2010 will be like. We have a new dog too. 
I am working on some videos concerning different facets of my business. I’m also working on some cool videos about things like step by step growing guides for bugs.
I’ve also started some work on videos for things like growing orange trees from seed and that sort of thing. Not really our normal stuff but stuff that I find fun none the less.
I’m going to start a video tomorrow where we take three different types of composting worms and place them in containers with the same bedding and food and we will check on them weekly for a month and then I’ll count the eggs and baby worms in each container to see how many we get per container. I’ think I’m going to us 25 worms in each container.
I may also do this with mealworms to see exactly how many worms a mealworm beetle actually makes. That should be fun.
Have any ideas for videos or projects? Post those here and if we pick your idea to make a movie or a project out of you will win free worms or beneficial insects of your choice.
Have a great 2010 and thanks for reading my blog.
Ken
I am so excited because the seed catalogs have started arriving in my mailbox over the past week or so. It’s two weeks before Christmas and it is cold and “snaining” (Mix of rain and snow. Yuck!) here.
I started thinking about my yearly soild improving plan. I have one every year and so should you. The soil improving plan doesn’t have to be some grand plan written by a professional. My plans are usually scribbled on scraps of paper tucked into some seed or plant catalog or in a notebook.
Last year my plan was to clean out several 100 foot worm beds and transfer the castings to my garden to create a thick loamy mass off goodness. I live in Monroe Township, New Jersey. The soil here is sand that is grey in color and turns desert-like when plowed. At least until it rains and the weeds sprout. I live on a road called “Matchaponix”. There were Lene Lenape Native Americans here hundreds of years before my family came here from Italy at the turn of the last century. “Matchaponix” was a name given by those Native Americans and mean “land of poor bread”. It was a reference to the soil in the area because it was difficult to grow grain to make bread. Enough said about the history of my poor garden soil.
My plan for 2010 is to add nitrogen fixing fodder plants to my garden in between my crops to enhance the nitrogen of my soil. Nitrogen is very important to plants. Many garden plants pull nutrients and nitrogen from the soil and use it to feed growth and create fruits and vegetables.
Nitrogen fixing fodder plants actually add nitrogen back into the soil through their roots. Some also can add nitrogen and important nutrients when you cut the tops and mix them back into your garden soil.
What plants are nitrogen fixing fodder plants?
Alfalfa- Sow in spring. This is probably the best nitrogen fixing plant. The cool thing is that you can plant this in your garden and dig holes in it to plant tomatoes and other vegetables. The roots do the nitrogen fixing but you can mow the tops and save them or compost the tops while still green and then mix the finished compost back into your soil.
Borage- better known as an herb to most gardeners, Borage also makes an excellent composting crop. Harvest after they flower and flop over. Then mix into your compost.
Clover (My 2nd Favorite)- I love clover because my bees use the flowers to make honey while the roots fix nitrogen into my soil. I also love that I can plant it in the fall and it will grow right through a mild winter leaving some really terrific soil for my plants in spring. My horses and rabbets also love to eat the flowers and leaves.
Crowder Peas- When the summer gets hot and other vegetables start to wither and flower plant Crowder Peas. They are one legume that loves the heat. You can also eat them.
Hairy Vetch- My teenage son told me that this sounds like a disgusting body part. Hairy Vetch Hairy Vetch is a top nitrogen fixing plant and it is very attractive because it is planted in late summer and isn’t cut until spring. It is a great winter cover crop. If you allow it to go to seed it will reseed your garden as a helpful weed and will help choke out other less desirable weeds.
Mustard- Is great for adding leaves to compost heaps. Mustard is one of the easiest plants to grow and it will grow quickly. It will not survive cold winters though. Keep some growing in various spots so that you can add the leaves to composting materials or use it to choke out weeds in your garden.
Quaker Comfrey (My favorite)- Not only is Quaker Comfrey a great nitrogen fixer right through the roots, it is also a perennial. Our rabbits and horses love it chopped up into their food and our red worms and euroworms eat it like crazy. All I do is throw some leaves in the worm bins and I let them go at them. I find more worm capsule(eggs) around those leaves than in any other spots. Manure from rabbits and horses that eat some comfrey with their food also creates a better worm casting product because of all of the nutrients.
Some good tips:
1. Rotate your garden spot if you can so that you can use nitrogen fixing plants in last year’s spot to allow the soil to recuperate before using it again. Giving the soil some time off will do wonders for your crops.
2. If you can’t rotate your garden spot then rotate your rows. Plant tomatoes in a row this year and then nitrogen fixing crops in that row next year. Most gardeners can rotate rows with less space problems.
3. Try to plant nitrogen fixing crops in the fall so that you can have your garden ready for spring. This will save you work because the cold will cut the plants back for you. You can then plant over the nitrogen fixing crop.
Please enjoy your garden. My garden is one of the many reasons I enjoy living.
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July 21st, 2010 | 
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