Looking to obtain vermiculture supplies -- worms & hardware

I want worms to eat my food scraps! Do you know where I can find both the worms and the hardware, i.e. container, to do vermiculture? I’d love to have worms eat my garbage and churn out choice compost for my and friends’ houseplants. Know of any suppliers in Taipei or Taipei County? Or elsewhere in Taiwan? I’d also love to get my hands on how-to-do-it info, so if you could suggest best Web links or sources for hard-copy material, I’d be ever so appreciative.

Wormly,

Matt

I easily made my own bin while in Canada. I imagine it’s not the different n Taiwan, except you need to protect them from the heat, rather than the cold!
Try www.wormcomposting.ca. It’ll help you set up your own system.

As for getting worms…I don’t know. I doubt I’ll be allowed to bring you a few… I’m leaving Canada end of Nov. If you do some research into importing worms, and tell me, I’ll see about bringing some with me!

For worms just go to a fishing supplies shop and buy some of the worms used for bait. I believe they are the same variety as the compost worms.

Matt, I used to vermicompost back in the States and am now living in Taiwan, so I came here to the forum wondering the same thing. Did you ever get set up?

Back home I made my bin from two large tupperware containers that I drilled MANY drainage and ventilation holes in. I put one inside the other and used the extra lid as a drip-catch. The worms I used back home were eisenia foetida, or red wigglers.

Just a note I read about using foreign worms: "CAUTION IN BUYING THESE WORMS, Eisenia foetida and “European night crawlers " are non native worms. With any non-native species, it is important not to allow them to reach the wild. Their voracious appetites and reproductive rates (especially among the red wigglers) have been known to upset the delicate balance of the hardwood forests by consuming the leaf litter too quickly. This event leaves too little leaf letter to slowly incubate the hard shelled nuts and leads to excessive erosion as well as negatively affecting the pH of the soil. So, do your best to keep them confined!” ehow.com/tips_4605228.html#ixzz274Kb7MoB

Avoid earthworms. they tend to simply eat nematodes and many native species here are deep dwellers. a lot of earthworms dig up and down, often up to 2 meters, and for that reason (and their diet) they are poor in composting things like kitchen scraps. I’m not sure what local bait stores sell to be honest.

What you want are surface/shallow soil dwellers. wigglers to be exact. there are many here. just go somewhere that is disturbed (ie not deep mountains) and lay down some cardboard and wet it. leave for a bit and a couple weeks later look under. or you can just go look under garbage that is already on the dirt, there are plenty everywhere. if they are dark reddish hues and they jump (wiggle) when you touch them, they be the good ones.

For simply adding kitchen scrapes i personally think the best rout is to fill the container, which should have drainage holes and ventilation holes in the side, about 2-3" with soil…heavy soil made mostly of clay silt. This will be a secure retreat that doesnt dry easy and a great place to lay eggs in without other stuff eating them. then throw your garbage plant foods on top.

dark is good, ie black and light cant penetrate. use a lid and avoid wet. If you have actual land on a house, nto an apartment, fungus and bacteria are by FAR better at decomposing plant waste, so having a small area to throw it on the ground and cover it from light will be far more faster than any other animal decomposer, though fly larvae are pretty good at their jobs!

A friend gave me some containers he bought here, they are black plastic and slotted and stackable. not super cheap and over kill. but work well if you dont like DIY.

What he said. Very bad idea importing foreign species; probably illegal anyway. The local worms will be adapted to Taiwan. Just bear in mind that ALL earthworms hate heat and direct sunlight. Keep your wormery somewhere cool and shaded, if that’s possible.

I believe the deep-dwellers are bigger than the surface dwellers, if that helps. They’re certainly huge on my land.

I also agree with pingdong that a wormery is rather pointless if you can simply build a compost heap on the ground (all sorts of useful bugs will naturally get in anyway, if they want to). It’s an awful lot of trouble keeping worms and the results aren’t that fantastic. Worms are part of an ecosystem - in my opinion, it’s both pointless and ineffective to separate them out and expect them to work at max. capacity.

I appreciate both your input very much and will certainly seek local, shallow wigglers if I pursue this. I have to disagree, though, that it is a lot of trouble to keep worms and the results aren’t that fantastic. I think to have such clean, super-potent worm castings as fertilizer from food scraps in just 3 months is AWESOME and I was very impressed with the difference they made on newly planted strawberry seedlings as opposed to those planted the year before without. I planted the second batch of seedlings with a bit of that “black gold” and they were far healthier and more productive with a better overall survival rate.

Less work than aerobic composting and far faster than anaerobic. The other point is that I may not end up with a good spot nearby for an anaerobic pile (although I’d be happy if I did!)

I too am looking for composting worms in the Kaohsiung area.

I bought my worms online. Try to search for 蚯蚓 on shopee or ruten.