Only Wormgineering LLC brings you Base Bedding specially formulated to get your vermiculture project off to a great start!
We also sell a hard to find "secret ingredient" for adding to your worm bedding and for organic gardening: Glacial Dust.
For now, our line of supplies is limited to hard-to-find stuff and exclusive mixes, but we are constantly looking to expand our offerings.
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I want to do everything I can to make it easy for you to be successful with your worm bins.
There are a lot of videos and articles out there showing you how easy it is to set up a worm bin. But few if any show you how to make the wormies truly comfy. It is true that you can just throw some soil and newspaper and worms and food in a plastic tote and the worms can survive. But the strategy behind the WormGin™ design is all about making the worms happy to find themselves in their new digs.
So I developed the Base Bedding recipe, and it tests out great. It is one of the reasons Worm Jugs have done so well in my testing, even though it was developed earlier for the WormGin™.
The second unique item is Glacial Dust. I sought out the ideal "grit source" for worms, and found this incredible mineral source. I am told that it is sustainable, but I have some research to do on that. Small quantities are available here for small-scale use by my customers. This is a product of Canada: Grand Forks BC. Check out Gaia Green's nice Product Guide (1.4 MB pdf). Rock dust has long been sold as a soil amendment. Glacial dust appears to be the special type of rock dust advanced gardeners have used for years. I also found an interesting reference from Target Products(66 KB pdf at http://www.targetproducts.com/catalog/specsheets/gladust.pdf) for their version of glacial dust. Look at all the stuff that's in there! The microorganisms will have what they need.
Thirdly, you can get top quality Loose Dry Coir for worm bins and gardening. Peat moss is bad, coir is good. Having a handful of loose coir to throw into an overfed worm bin can be very handy.
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This is not some expensive hobby and I am not going to try to soak you for supplies you don't need. But there are some things I think you might like that you won't find elsewhere.
When you purchase a Regular WormGin™ you have the opportunity to buy supplies without paying extra shipping charges, because the box size causes UPS to charge for 17 pounds more than the actual contents of the box.
Base Bedding:
When you buy a WormGin™ worm bin, you get a lot more than the hardware. Your Red Wigglers need bedding, and a big part of making this as foolproof as possible is giving them the best start possible, and you do that by providing ideal bedding.
Creating an ideal worm bedding was one of the first things I saw in this hobby that no one had really done, and would be a good engineering project. A lot of research went into this mixture.
| Ingredient | Description | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Coir | This is the best coir pith I've seen; loose, never compressed | Moisture retention, pH buffer, bulk |
| Garden Soil | A dormant mix of topsoil and well aged manure-based compost | For minerals, wee beasties & soil variety |
| Gopher Soil | High clay content Oregon soil gathered from gopher mounds; dormant | Minerals for cation exchange, soil variety |
| Vermicompost | From the Wormgineer's own bins: a mix of finished and highly active compost |
Innoculation of the web of life needed in your worm bin |
| Food | Oat groats, well cooked and then fermented at room temperature for about a week | Long-lasting base food for full biological activation of the bedding |
| Oregon beach sand | Basaltic sand from the clean beaches near Astoria Oregon | Large grit particles, minerals |
| Glacial Dust | A very special powder from glacial grinding of rock | Mineralization supercharge, fine grit |
| Dolomitic lime | Unhydrated pelleted dolomitic limestone | Acidification prevention (pH buffer) |
| Crushed Eggshells | From white eggs from the supermarket, well rinsed, dried and stored. | Long-term organic calcium, pH buffer |
Proportions: 4 parts coir, 1 part each for the soils, compost and food; the sand, dust, lime and eggshells appx 1/16 part each. Naturally chlorine-free, soft and pure well water is added to bring to appx 85% moisture content, so the bedding is ready for worms. A dry version (without the food and water) may become available at a later date or by request.
Lots of new worm bins will see the worms crawling all over the inside of the bin right after you first put them in. But with the Base Bedding, they don't often do that, because they don't feel the need to seek better conditions. This recipe has been well tested and Red Wigglers thrive in it.
Note that there is NO peat moss in the recipe. It is NOT eco-friendly and not that great for worms anyway. Peat is too acidic and an unnatural material because composting and peat bogs are two completely different paths in Nature for organic carbon.
Dry Loose Coir:
There are plenty of sources for compacted bricks of coconut coir ("koy-er") on the web. But it is always compressed into bricks - good luck finding it available loose. Loose is what you want and here's why: emergency backup if you overfeed your worm bin.
The property that makes coir such a great bedding material is the amount of moisture it can absorb.
When you overfeed, one problem is having too much moisture and another problem is too much stink. If you throw a few handfuls of dry coir on the mess, hey presto both problems are solved - as long as you catch the overfeeding soon enough.
To soak up extra moisture, the coir needs to be dry and loose. But if all you have is a brick of the stuff, you need to get it wet to get it loose. You can do that ahead of time and then dry it out over a few weeks, or you can buy your coir dry and loose in the first place. So here you go.
Glacial Dust:
I wonder if you've ever heard of glacial dust. No, it isn't from World of Warcraft. I found it while researching the need for grit in a worm bin, because Red Wigglers have a crop and gizzard system similar to a bird's which uses rock particles to grind up the worm's food.
Glacial dust is extremely finely ground rock harvested from glacial deposits. The tiny particles are much more available as basic minerals to organisms, and tests of the stuff on mineral-depleted soils have shown great results.
To be honest, for all I know the particles are too small to be of use to the worms. But I think they would work with larger rock particles from the soils and sand inside the gizzard to help digestion. Kids, looking for a science project? Find out what size particles E. fetida prefers, the judges should love it.
Glacial Dust is available in small quantities, for use in worm bins to make sure they have the grit they need. One pound is enough for as many as ten wormbins. I will sell you up to 10 pounds for organic gardening. If you purchase a Regular size WormGin™ you get "free shipping" on up to 10 pounds of supplies. You can combine the shipping with a Junior size WormGin™ purchase.
Oregon Beach Sand:
I know, you can find sand anywhere, and basaltic sand is certainly nothing special. But it does make for excellent grit for Red Wigglers, and I do have a bucket of the stuff. I can sell you some if you want, so why not?
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