Jon asked 6 years ago
Hi Brian, I just recently bought a Reln Worm Cafe 3 Tier worm farm from Bunnings. Can you give me an idea how many African Nightcrawlers I can keep in it? It has 3 tiers but as I am starting out I will be using 1 tier first.
Just curious how many African Nightcrawlers would I need to start my worm farm. I will be using the worms for fishing as well as breaking down my kitchen scraps.
wormadmin Staff answered 6 years ago
Hi Jon,
Thanks for asking your question.
Wow – thats an easy and a hard question rolled into one.
In my experience its very hard to grow fishing worms in a small plastic farm like those. I usually try to discourage people from doing it, as I think it quite likely they will fail. There’s a lot more to it than throwing some worm sin a bucket or box and waiting for the bait sized worms to appear.
To answer your question in a roundabout way, they are about 2 square feet of surface area. Composting worms, regardless of the species, would max that out at between 1 to 2 pounds of worms per square foot.
Lets call it one lb/sqft – that makes 2 lbs (1 kilo) – if it’s 2 lbs/sqft that makes 4 lbs or 2 kilos of worms.
As to how many worms needed to start one off – I usually recommend 200 grams; but you could literally start with 10 or 20 worms, it would just take longer.
Here is another article I wrote on the subject – note that while I will not tell you how to breed bait (I’m a bait breeder after all) – at the very least you should start from a point of finding out how to look after composting worms properly – my FAQ guide in the lewft side of the site would be a good start 😉
https://thewormman.com.au/question/how-to-make-a-worm-farm-for-fishing-bait/
Thanks again for asking your question
Regards
Brian