Worm Man's Worm Farm

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?