The old bedding from the polystyrene box will contain between 3000 and 6000 capsules, with the potential to hatch between 12.000 and 24,000 Red worms. You now transfer this bedding to Grower Bed. Ideal for this is an open box measuring 2400 mm X 900mm X150 mm deep, mounted clear of the you To prepare the Grower Bed, you must fill it with feed a week beforehand, soak the bedding thoroughly arid allow is to drain. Now make a trench down the middle of the bedding, 100 mm deep, and sprinkle your Breeder Box contents evenly along it. Cover it over by replacing the bedding removed from the trench and then cover the entire bed with hessian. (We use organic wheaten straw.) Apart from watering according to need, this bed can be left for three months, by which time the worms hatched from the capsules will have reached market size,
You will need to empty and refill one Breeder Box and start one Grower Bed each week for three months before your first harvest of fishing worms. This means that you will eventually have three Breeder Boxes and thirteen Grower Beds in constant use
A Continuous Supply
One week after you have started Grower Bed number thirteen, you must return to bed number one, empty it of worms and bedding, and immediately refill it with new bedding, which you have already prepared, and the contents of the next Breeder Box. From then on it is a continuous cycle. Each week, you will empty and refill one Breeder Box and one Grower Bed. By this time you should have also canvassed for customers because you now have product to sell.
The Harvest
Separate the worms from the Grower Bed bedding by light retraction. These arc your fishing worms. Because they will all have hatched within seven days of each other, they will all be of the same size and can be packed in the sale punnet, very rapidly by volume and not by count.
You may find that this method doesn’t work out exactly according to this book because rates of breeding and bodily growth vary according to the season the year and the temperature. The feed used and the technique, that invaluable element which comes only with experience and understanding, may also differ. However, it should not take you long to find out how it can best work for you
