Worms...The Road to Riches?

A long long time ago, in a faraway place, when I was very ambitious and had a lot of space and room, I became enamored of raising rabbits, and at that time toyed with the idea of raising worms also. For those uninformed souls who do not know how the two go together....let me explain: rabbits are often raised in open crates or pens on legs above open ground, often with no "pans" below the pens, so that the rabbit turds and such will drop through the grate directly to the ground below. In these instances, keeping a worm bed below the rabbits is great for two reasons,the worms get fed from the rabbit droppings, and the worms "change" the droppings into a great compost material, even better than just plain rabbit droppings!

For quite awhile I was busily involved in building rabbit cages, charting rabbit pregnancies, and sacking up rabbit turds. I studied and read about it, thought about it, but didnt go with the worms at the time...oh, no, I had the pans under the cages and emptied them daily and scrubbed them daily, quite a smelly and nasty chore. I made some mistakes...I didn't raise the MEAT rabbits. (That might have been a great market)! Oh no, I wanted the cute little furry ones that the pet stores buy. And I wasn't able to sell the rabbit turds to anyone except local gardeners, the big time companies like the farm and garden stores didn't want it because it wasn't good "compost". So, in the end, the rabbit business sort of "fizzled out".

Now I am in a smaller place,and not nearly so ambitious...well, maybe deep down I still am, because I still harbor the notion of trying, if not the rabbits....at least the worms. Especially in this day and age, when garbage is piling up in the world at an alarming rate. Did you know that worms are the next best thing to garbage disposals, don't cost you anything electrically speaking, (dont need repairs either), and are a great way to NATURALLY and HARMLESSLY provide great compost material from household garbage. Turns out worms don't necessarily have to have rabbit turds to eat, they can survive quite well on daily garbage. Yup, leftover banana peels,the scrapings out of the chicken noodle soup bowl, the leavings of the kid's cereal bowls after breakfast...

There is even such a thing as an under the sink worm pail or bucket , if you will,to dump your food garbage (yes, even paper garbage too) and if the bucket is "populated" with good healthy worms, your garbage will be eaten up and turned into compost! All of this with no chemicals, no smell (Yes really that's what they claim!) and no "mess", to say nothing of the countless times you have to reach under the sink and fiddle with the garbage disposal unit when it sticks!

So who knows? Maybe the day is coming soon. I have a big, empty, damp and otherwise not very useful basement. Too dark and damp to store anything in, but it might be a great place to raise worms. How about it? A "worm farm" ! Maybe I can get the neighbors turned on to donating their garbage! Maybe this little town in the middle of Iowa can become the recycling center and guiding light for a whole new "back to mother nature" movement! If nothing else, maybe I can sell some worms!