Ok I know this thread is quite old now but its a subject Im quite qualified in
some 20 years ago I set up a company importing worms from Holland USA and Canada
We rented a small farm and also bred some of our own, We also supplied the Angling Times with there own portable worm breeder called the green machine, memories memories, We also wasted thousands of pounds doing trial runs with local councils as part of a recycling campaign,
Building something to breed worms in is simple, feeding them and keeping the stocks up is the tricky part
The easy part
Any container will do depending on the scale of your operation my worm bed is about 6 ft sqaure built from concrete blocks at the end of the garden.
we used to use wheelie bins for our commercial operation and would suit most anglers and keep them supplied with a good amount of worms, another good product is an old water butt especially if it has a tap on the bottom as drainage is one of the main issues
So find your container from the bottom up you need to drill some small holes around 3mm drill these all around the base coming up to around 60mm from the bottom, fill the bottom of the container with pea shingle and a small covering of course sharp sand make sure you go above the drain holes, if you can get your hands on Lytag which is a light expanded clay agregate then your quids in.
For the medium we used a mixture of riddled soil and peat dont use the dry brown peat use bog peat the black stuff, the brown one is far too acidic. add this untill you reach two thirds of the way up, the last third being for food, add a good helping of starter worms try to keep away from Brandlings Reds and Dendra's will live happily together and don't try to keep lob worms in there, if one dies like in your small tubs it will eventually kill your whole stock.
The food
Ok we tried hundreds of different materials 3 of which came out on top, used tea bags and coffee grinds, thats the bags as well rip them up and just throw them in, all filter coffee bags will do, the next best thing was cardboard and paper worms adore it, they eat through it so fast its unreal, all of our commercial worm breeding pits were covered with corrogated cardboard this provided a little insulation and a great food source,
you can also add all of your left over vegtables, potato peelings etc just keep it varied and make sure you give them a head start by chopping it all up.
Stay away from watering its not really needed unless its over dry there is enough water made during the decomposition of the food source. if your lucky enough to have a tap on the bottom what is mentioned above is correct the liquid produced is as good if not better than baby bio, its well worth bottling up.
The whole process can take a while to get going but its worth it.
The cardboard trick is quite handy if you need a few dozen hook samples quickly, pull back the cardboard and you should be greated by quite a few worms munching on the cardboard, newspaper can also be used.
you need to remember natural light is not good for worms keep a lid on the top.
A note about lobworms, don't add them to your breeder if they die they will in most cases cause the whole wormery to die I have had this happen and lost millions in a few days, somewhere around 200 kilo's all because I had a few hundred lobs over and I threw them in one of the beds, we don't know why this happens but im sure you have all smelt them once they have died
If you need any help on this subject give me a shout
JC
worms
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