Granny Tate’s Sure-fire Way to Catch Dew Worms for Fishing
When I was a boy, my grandparents had a wonderful large summer estate on Lake of Bays in the Muskoka area of Ontario. Besides, swimming, boating, water-fights, and excursions of all kinds, we kids and cousins wanted to go fishing every once in a while. But before we headed out, we needed to get some worms. So we went to our grandmother who prepared a batch of diluted powdered hot mustard. It worked great!
Here’s what you need:
- A jug of water
- A teaspoon of powdered mustard and a large spoon for stirring
- A bowl of water to rinse the worms in
- A tin can filled with moss to keep the worms in.
- A spoon or trowel
- And a tray to carry it all on.
A few simple things are needed to catch worms
Here’s what you do:
Find a likely spot on a lawn somewhere where you find worm castings. What are worm castings? They are little piles of dirt that look like they have squirted out of a tube of toothpaste. They are often mixed with tiny sticks or leaves.
Scrape off the pile with your trowel, and you will find a little hole in the ground, the worm’s burrow.
Pour the mustard solution into the hole and wait a few seconds. If a worm is in the area, it will come up within 30 or 40 seconds. And it’s skin will be stinging because of the mustard. So pick it up swirl it around in the bowl of water and drop it into the tin can.
Simple, eh? In 15 minutes you will have plenty of worms for fishing.
Definitely Red Wigglers. They eat more and are perfect for vmosicrepomting for several reasons. They hate light and will not try to escape, but rather will burrow down into your compost. They have the perfect digestive system and they reproduce quickly if there is plenty of food. I do compost with worms using the Worm Factory 360. It makes separating the worms from the castings mostly automatic. After one tray is full, you add food to the next level and some of the worms will crawl up to it. Others will stay below and finish eating the first tray until there is nothing left to eat. At that time, you move that tray to the top level and leave it open so that the light will send the worms back down to the current feeding tray. After a day (leave the light on at night), most of them will have left the tray full of worm castings. There will some who didn’t leave and you can pull them out if you find them.If you don’t use a multi-level system like the Worm Factory, you can try to feed worms in one area of the bin and then move to another area and hopefully most of the worms will move out of the first area when it has no food left, then you can harvest the castings in one area of the bin at a time. I haven’t done it this way, but suspect it’s not quite as easy.Overall, I would say that worm composting is fairly easy and actually quite amazing. I think you’ll enjoy it no matter what type of bin you use.