It's working now!

We got the heater fixed. Actually the heater wasn't broken, Chuck accidently reversed the wires when he hooked up the new thermostat. That was a relief.

Oh My!

I totally jinxed us! The day after my last post, our heater quit working. Chuck and I spent 1 1/2 hours in 5 degree weather moving our worms from the worm shed to our heated garage. We didn't lose the worms thank goodness! The heater is now fixed, but we really, really don't want to haul all the worms back until it warms up just a bit hehe.

December - Merry Christmas!

Hey all. We are getting ready for our winter harvest here in the next week or so. . .most likely the week of Christmas, since the kids will be home to help out. And let me tell you, they are so excited NOT hehe.

It is freezing here, but our worms are nice and toasty warm out in their heated shed! We've gotten about 6 inches of snow the past 2 days and now that the storm has blown over and it's a clear night, it's only about 5 degrees outside tonight (it's 9:26 pm).

Chuck spent last Thursday at the middle school teaching the 6th graders all about worms. He had 5 classes he taught. The last class has our 6th grader in it. At the end of the class the teacher was asking what everyone learned. She got to our daughter and the reply was "nothing." That got a good laugh out of the class. Later that day our daughter was at 4-H and was selected to speak at the fair next August about vermicomposting. She was pretty excited she was picked to speak.

Well, don't forget, it doesn't have to be summer to order product from us. We've been shipping things out all fall, and actually just sent castings out in the mail today for a customer.

Thanks for reading.

The Last Day

Today is Chuck's last day at the SLC Pioneer Park Farmer's Market. Thank you to all those who have met him there and purchased our castings/tea/worms. We sure appreciate your business. We will have more product about the middle of October and we plan on expanding through the winter so we don't experience this problem next year. We can't believe how fast we sold out this year and how popular our castings/tea are becoming. Hang in there and we will have lots of product this spring.

Hey All . . .

Sorry, I haven't posted in awhile. Things are still going strong at the Salt Lake City Farmer's Market at Pioneer Park. If you haven't been and you live in the area, it's definately worth the visit. Don't forget to stop by our booth and let us know you read our blog.

Thanks to the commentor

of my last post, here is Olson's website.

The farmer's market went pretty good last week. We are hoping for better weather this weekend for all your shoppers.

It's just about here . . .

Saturday is the opening day of the farmer's market Chuck goes to all summer long. It is at Pioneer Park in Salt Lake City. It's huge and lots of people are there selling and buying. Hope to see you there!

It's Official

We have dropped the rates on our 5 quart and 5 gallon containers of Worm Castings. Our 5 quart bucket is now $15 instead of $20 and our 5 gallon bucket is $35 instead of $45. So, what are you waiting for? Chuck will be delivering in the Salt Lake City area in 2 weeks. Order now and save shipping costs.

Two New Stores

We now have two new stores carrying our Worm Castings. The first one is Olson's Nursery in Lehi, Utah (they don't have a website sorry) and Cactus & Tropicals in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Busy Weekend With no End in Sight!

We've got about 500 lbs of castings to deliver on Wednesday. One customer wants 300 lbs and we have two stores in SLC that are wanting to put our Worm Castings on their shelves. Chuck's worked long and hard to convince them to try it, but it took a few people actually going into the store looking for our Worm Castings to convince the store owners to carry our product.

Chuck and Makiya along with a boy from here in town have been busy screening castings. We are in the process of getting a new harvester, so they've had to screen everything by hand 2x's. It's been quite a project with me having to bake castings all day yesterday and today and I still have about 50 lbs to bake tomorrow. We bake them for about 15 minutes to kill any worms or other little creepy crawly things so people don't open their containers and find bugs crawling around. They won't hurt your plants, but people usually get a little nervous finding bugs in their castings.

Well it's getting late and our little guy is finally tired (he took a long nap today), so it's finally time for bed! Yeah!

Shhhh it's a secret for now

but we have decided to lower the prices of our Worm Castings this summer . . .well, starting soon. We now produce enough that cost wise we can afford to sell them cheaper . .which will help our customers grow fantastic gardens this summer at an even more affordable price. Watch for the "real" announcement soon.

Natural Resource Festival

The Natural Resource Festival this year was a success. Lots of people came through and learned a lot about Vermicomposting. This first picture is of Chuck and our booth.
Here's the view along one of the walls across the arena from us. The last two years the event has been held at the Sevier Valley Center on the mezanine. On the floor is a Home and Garden show going on at the same time. There is also an art show going on at the same time. It's nice that they've moved it all into one building.

Our kids had a blast too. We hung out there Thursday after school and then again on Saturday. The pictures are all from Saturday.

This contraption spins around, sideways, upside down etc. Shayla was pretty freaked out and lasted all of about 2 minutes. None of my other kids would even attempt it.

This next picture is courtesy of Capitol Reef National Park's booth.

The Hoogle Zoo booth this year had a King Snake and this Tortoise. Joshua absolutely loved hanging out with the Tortoise. At one point he and Shayla went out and picked danilions to feed it. He loved them.

Chuck is always looking for funny hats. He bought this one from Oriental Trading. It's a hamburger! Cool huh.

This was a fun booth. The fire is fake, but looked so real.

There was a petting zoo this year (if you can call two llamas, a pony a few goats and a couple of rabbits a pettying zoo). In this picture you can see one of the baby goats along with a full grown rabbit. That baby goats was the size of the rabbit. The babies were so dang cute! The mom and dad goats were only about 18-20 inches tall! I want one.

Here are a couple of the baby goats.

Here is Joshua petting the shetland pony. He had a lot of fun at the petting zoo.

Here is the last picture of the festival. At the end someone at another booth was taking the number off the wall and stuck it on Joshua. Then a whole bunch of other people started doing the same thing. He looked so funny walking around with all the numbers on him.


Well, that was the festival for 2009. It had a great turn out and we had a wonderful time.

Recycle Utah

Chuck will be doing a seminar at Recycle Utah in Park City on Tuesday evening 6:00 pm. Email us if you are interested in attending : rottenapplewormfarm@yahoo.com

New Look

Hey readers . . . I've changed the look of our official website. Check it out at www.rottenapplewormfarm.com

We've changed the look of our business cards, brochures and labels and thought it would be nice to update our website to the same color scheme.

So Sorry . . .

Wow, I just realized it's been 2 weeks since I last blogged here. We've started getting a few seminar/classes on our schedule for spring! The first one will be at Recycle Utah in Park City the 2nd week of April (they don't have the date set yet) and the second one is the Natural Resource Fair here in Richfield. This is attened by a LOT of students, but it is also opened to the general public. That will be held April 23-25 at the Sevier Valley Center (I think, that is where it was last year). This is always a lot of fun and has a lot of information about all sorts of topics. My girls love going to it each year.

Chuck is also planning on being at the Salt Lake City Farmer's Market each Saturday this summer.

We have still been busy with this last harvest. We just about have everything done for the ton of castings being sent to Idaho in March, and now we are busy getting worm beds fed, and filled, so that in May we can harvest again so there is product for the Market this summer. We've already had a lot of people calling to make sure we'll be there! It's alot of fun watching this little business grow as more and more people learn what a wonderful product worm castings are.

Sorry, no pictures this time.

Career Day at the Middle School

Yesterday Chuck spent a couple of hours at the middle school talking about our worm farm. Here's a video and photo.

Wednesday, January 28

Chuck hasn't done anything with the worm farm the last 2 days. He also tunes pianos and he's had to put that hat on yesterday and today. He'll be back at it tomorrow.

Sunday, January 25

Wow, finally a day off. Yesterday I was gone most of the day and Chuck had Makiya out helping him. They were able to get all the left over bedding from the harvest back into the beds into the new shed, they also cut pvc pipe in half and attached it to the wood stands to make gutters for the worm tea that runs out the bottom of the beds after we water. The tea is collected into buckets and then when those are full we dump them into big garbage cans to store the tea. When it's time for the farmer's market we bottle the tea and sell it. It's a great source of nutrients, as well as, a great pesticide.

Athough it rained pretty hard yesterday, it didn't seem as muddy out there as it did the day before. That was nice, because when our dirt (which is really red clay) gets wet you sink up to your ankles!

We got a call yesterday from one of our regular customers. He's ready for his annual 200 lbs. He raises organic tomatoes and uses our castings for starting his plants in his green house. The first year he used our castings, his starts were ready for planting way earlier than normal. He was thrilled with our product. Here is an article about his farm. (The link at the bottom to his website doesn't work.)

January 22nd

Oh no! Chuck was walking out to the worm shed this morning and slipped in our yucky messy mud (it's been raining). He hurt his wrist, but I must say, he's still out working, even though he's hurting pretty bad!

Wednesday, January 21st

Today Chuck spent a considerable amount of time insulating the new shed. We don't want all the heat escaping out the roof! We are quite excited too, he's finished the first set of screening on the castings. We have a huge order to fill in March and we've been stressed that we wouldn't be able to fill it (1 ton!) and still have castings left over for the Farmer's Market Chuck goes to during the summer. But, he filled the 1 ton bag and we have 1/2 ton left and our new beds have enough worms that we should be able to harvest at least that much again in 3-4 months.

Tuesday, January 20

Chuck delivered an aquarium full of worm bedding and worms to Shayla's class at school today. The teacher will be using it in their science class. We've provided worms for several school classes the past couple of years. The kids bring in left over lunch stuff to feed them, and they take turn watering them etc. The kids always love caring for the worm bed, and it teaches them how composting with worms really works.

Monday, January 19th

I've got a few pictures and a video for you today. This fall Chuck has worked hard on building our first new worm shed. He's got it built, but as you can see we still need to get it sided. At least it's able to hold our worms now.


This is a row of beds in our new shed. We got these new beds set up a couple of weeks ago, but until Saturday there was no heat in the new shed. Now there is heat, the beds are thawed and we will be adding worms to each of these beds tonight.


On Saturday, Chuck started harvesting the beds we have in the garage. This picture is of our worm casting harvester. Chuck shovels in everything that was in a worm bed. Then it get spun and the castings fall through to the ground, newspaper, and worms and rocks, etc, fall to the end, where one of the kids push everything off into containers at the end. We will then sort through that stuff my hand getting the worms out and they will go back in fresh bedding towards the end of the week (we hope).

Here's a little video of Chuck and Makiya havesting.

In the Past

Like I said, we've been farming for 4 years now. We've learned alot and changed alot of things over the years. Here are some pictures from April, 2007. I will be out this week taking current ones, but it will give you an idea of what goes into producing the worm castings.

This first pictures is my husband, Chuck and our youngest daughter, Shayla, mixing the worm bedding. They had to mix the shredded newspaper, grass clippings and, manure with water before adding it to the worm bed.

We transformed our 2 car garage into a worm shed. We set up these beds for our worms and the garage is heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer. Worms bred best at about 60-75 degrees. The bedding that Chuck and Shayla are mixing in the above picture is put into these beds and then worms are added. In 3-5 months the worms have changed the paper to poop. Each container will have about 80 lbs of castings in it at the end of the 3-5 months.

This is our son Joshua. He was 2 1/2 in this picture and he was finally not afraid to touch the worms.

This next picture is of worm capsules (eggs). This is really up close. Most capsules are the size of a nerd candy (have you seen those?) Each capsule will have between 2-20 baby worms hatch. They take 2-3 weeks to hatch. The green capsules are new, and the redish ones are getting ready to hatch.

This picture is of two worms mating. They have both sets of sex organ, so they will both lay a fertilized egg capsule.

Starting in 2007 we particpate in the annual Natural Resource Fair put on in the area. We meet with 100's of students as well as adults each year and show them how to use worms for composting. Yes, the girls say, ewww gross and the boys want to dig in and find the worms we bring.

Welcome!

I've been blogging for a long time, but that has mostly been scrapbooking and family stuff. I've decided, since it interests so many people, to set up a new blog about our family worm farm.

We live in central Utah and we have been raising Red Wiggler worms for 4 years now. This is a fantastic form of organic composting and recycling.

Worm castings (which is worm poop), is nature's fertilizer. As you follow the blog you'll be able to learn how we turn newspaper, horse manure and grass clippings into a very rich compost that can used on house plants, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, lawns, shrubs and trees. It is pretty amazing stuff!

Also, never hesitate to ask questions in the comment section.

Once again, welcome to my new blog.