Wermz

[Carp Artist]

Just remember SK when off in pursuit of the mighty and noble lobworm. It's the early bird which catches the worm.

[Dave Burr]

Worming on the grass outside the college, what fun and what strange questions you get asked

To keep your red worms the old school way, store them in a tin in some damp moss and turn it each day. As they move through the moss it scours the worms and toughens them up no end.

[Stathamender]

Excellent red worms can be dug out of manure heaps but my favourite collection method is visiting the village cricket pitch in the dark after rain when you can easily collect 100s of lobs in no time at all.

Do that kind of thing round where I live (a rather gritty urban environment) and you could end up getting arrested and/or mugged. No cricket pitches within easy reach but there are a couple of municipal bowling greens.

Odd that this thread should appear as I've just started a wormery. Up to a couple of months ago we lived in a house with extensive gardens front and back with big lawns and had no less than five black daleks (all free from the council) on the go, as well as several of those wooden frame things for leaf rotting. Every autumn we'd fill at least 40 big black plastic sacks with leaves for the first stage of composting. One piece of advice I'd give is that you can add lawn clippings to compost bins, we had two lawns each about 100m sq and they were mowed once a week and the clippings split between two bins, but you need to mix them with 'brown material' i.e. something fibrous. Semi-composted leaves are ideal, you get a really good compost out of this mix (eventually) but shredded paper is a good substitute (I used to work in the Civil Service so I had ready access to nicely filled shredding bins). We also had large piles of wood chippings from any work carried out on the numerous trees on our old property, and they're really good mixed with lawn clippings too.

But we recently downsized as part of a plan to buy a place in Southern France and are now in a terrace house with a back yard rather than a garden so a wormery suggested itself rather than paying for rather small quantities of worms from tackle shops. A big lob legered on a number 6 for perch or a bunch of redworms run through a river swim for chub. One problem with a wormery is that it takes time (several months) to actually get it up and running and that's when the worms are at their most fragile: start harvesting before they begin reproducing in numbers and you could endanger the whole colony. The people who sell wormeries will tell you lobs don't work and you have to have dendras etc but I've seen stuff that says there's no problem and I can't see why there should be, I've already got quite a few lobs living in my wormery apparently quite happily. I'll go out looking for lobs soon and save any I have left over from tackle shop buys and start adding them, I might even buy in a joblot from these people http://www.yorkshire-worms.co.uk/ (unless anyone can suggest somewhere cheaper). I'll take up the potato tip: there's a friend of mine who's got an allotment and he grows potatoes, although I think he will want me to do rather more digging than it takes to collect a couple of dozen lobs.

One thing we're doing is setting up a bokashi system (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... lys-fowler) it takes a little longer to get this all setup and meshed together but once you do it works much faster (supposedly) with greater worm production.