Raising Worms…
A great way to give chickens regular protein is to raise your own meal worms.
There are two ways of doing this. You can buy some meal worms and then start a meal worm farm, or you can catch flies – I’ll do another post on this some time soon.
Meal worms take a bit of work to get going but once you get going its totally worth it.
I keep my worms in a large plastic set of draws (making sure there is enough air able to circulate). I have two draws for worms (about 1-inch-deep maximum of worms).
Then one draw is for beetles and the other for the bran (hopefully) rich in eggs.
When I started with worms I was told to put mesh under the beetles and the eggs will fall through – this is not true, the eggs are sticky and stay put right where they are so it’s easier to remove the beetles from eggs rather than the other way around.
Worms like to live in old bran/meal etc, so friends (and the local health food shop) give me their old flours and I sprinkle this in with them once a week.
They get water from vegetables slices, like carrot, potato and courgette, so I put one of these in (chopped up) once a week also.
They prefer the dark and for it not to be too cold.
I keep some of the worms back from becoming chicken feed and these turn into larvae and then to beetles.
Once they have changed into beetles I put them into a separate draw and, feed and water them the same as the worms. Everyone 10/14 days I pick the beetles out and put them into a third draw and what’s left behind should be bran full of eggs (if you leave the beetles in this they eat the eggs). Then I add more eggy-bran to the same draw.
After several weeks you might start to see the bran moving slightly, this is the eggs hatching and a new lot of meal worms growing.
Worms do much better in the spring, when things are warming up, but not too warm. If you want worms more regularly throughout the year you will need to mimic spring temperatures a bit (and maybe bring them inside).
Then the cycle starts again.
Each beetle can lay thousands of eggs.
For more healthy hints, tips and recipes check out my books on this link here.
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