Quote:
Originally Posted by phil
Im always looking for my next project and im a cheap bastid. I foresee the day hopefully soon when my son is old enough to tag along on fishing trips. Do any of you keep your own worm beds? Seems like a pretty easy project, takes up little to no space in my backyard and I can stick it by my shed away from my house along a fence completely hidden out of view.
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As a kid, my Dad and I used take flashlights and go worm hunting after dark on our front lawn after a good rain storm.
The night crawlers were about half way out of their holes and were easy to see (without scaring them) if you used a piece of RED cellophane over the flashlight light beam. Apparently worms can't see red light. You could grab them at the point where they came out of the ground and then
GENTLY pull them out. If you pulled too hard or fast, you would break them. We could literally get hundreds of them if you wanted to. We usually took about a 100 or so.
(You can do this on a lawn or field which hasn't been treated with insect spray or weed killers. There wont be many worms if the ground has been treated.)
Keeping them was no problem if you had a cool garage or shed in the summer, and a cool (not hot) place where they wouldn't freeze in the winter.
Simply get a corrugated cardboard box about 2 feet square, and a foot high. Put down layers of water-soaked newspaper inside. Use the regular black & white print only. (For some reason the worms react badly to the shiny colored pages.) Alternate the pages with about a dozen worms on each layer. Make sure you keep the newsprint wet, but
not under water. Feed the worms about every two weeks with coffee grounds lightly sprinkled between the layers. Change the paper and re-layer the worms every month or so if the pages start to get slimey or the box starts to smell. When done correctly, there should be no odor coming from thr box.
When you go fishing, simply lift up a layer or two and take as many as you need.
Two things to watch out for are mice and ants.
Either of these will decimate the worm box in a few days if you don't detect that they have found it.
Good luck,
Denny
