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Unseasonably warm January weather always gets us thinking about gardening, the rich smell of the soil, and our friends the earthworms. You too? Sounds like you're looking for information about raising a crop of your own wriggling soil aerators and enrichers -- or maybe you're an angler and you want to grow your own bait. Starting with a Yahoo! search for "worm bed" will head you in the right direction. The first result took us to a commercial category in Yahoo!'s directory called Worm Composting, which included a page from the Impact Worm Farm that mentioned "bed construction." They sell a video about worm farming, but the free information on their web site didn't answer your basic question. We wondered if we'd do better looking at non-commercial sites, so we changed our search terms -- and typed in "worm composting." This turned up a non-commercial Worm Composting category and a fresh list of sites to browse. We spent some time reading about vermiculture (i.e., worm-farming) and vermi-composting (using worms to convert food scraps into castings that add nutrients to your
garden soil, which produces a colony of thriving redworms in the process). We noticed that lots of these pages describe special bins and devices you can buy or build to house the worms. This is imperative in areas where winter temperatures regularly drop below 40 degrees. In warm winter areas, an outdoor "worm pit" is a viable alternative. We found the best instructions for digging a worm pit from Backyard Magic: The Composting Handbook, a publication from the New Brunswick Department of the Environment. Here's what these resourceful Canadian recyclers have to say to warmer weather gardeners: To make a worm pit, all you have to do is dig a square hole a couple of feet deep and set a bottomless
box over it. The compost materials and worms are tossed in here. You can keep adding organic waste as it accumulates... Keep the pile damp and dark, and the worms will do the rest." If you want to know how to harvest this rich compost we recommend watching City Farmer's QuickTime movie called Wormshop: How to Harvest Your Bin. More questions? There's even a Compost Hotline!
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