pywong
27th October 2008, 07:01 PM
4 months ago, we decided to take up vermiculture - rearing of earthworms. The intention was to learn how to do it and then teach the kids at the Desa Mentari Soup Kitchen to develop an entrepreneur project around it.
We started off with 300 worms - African Night Crawler (Eudrilus eugeniae) -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudrilidae, and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworm.
The supplier told us that we could expect 150 to 200 worms a year from each worm. So we were counting our chickens - Wow! 50,000 worms in 1 year. Fantastic!
2 1/1 months later, the worms started dying off. We couldn't quite figure out what happened. The supplier said it could be excessive ammonia. We suspect it could be the fungus that was growing on top of the cardboard. Fortunately, we managed to salvage a few worms and put them in another box. This is now the nucleus for the new colony that hopefully can survive better.
See photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/pywong07/EarthwormProject#
We started off with 300 worms - African Night Crawler (Eudrilus eugeniae) -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudrilidae, and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworm.
The supplier told us that we could expect 150 to 200 worms a year from each worm. So we were counting our chickens - Wow! 50,000 worms in 1 year. Fantastic!
2 1/1 months later, the worms started dying off. We couldn't quite figure out what happened. The supplier said it could be excessive ammonia. We suspect it could be the fungus that was growing on top of the cardboard. Fortunately, we managed to salvage a few worms and put them in another box. This is now the nucleus for the new colony that hopefully can survive better.
See photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/pywong07/EarthwormProject#