Woodland Worm Company

Today I'm talking with Jonathan at Woodland Worm Company. You can also follow on Facebook.

00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. Today I'm talking with Jonathan at Woodland Worm Company. Hi, Jonathan, how are you today? Great, how are you doing? I'm good. I've been looking forward to this interview because I have not talked to anyone about earthworms before. Awesome. So tell me about yourself and Woodland Worm Company. So I am...

00:29
I am the owner of Woodland Worm Co. We were formerly Wiggle Worm Farms, but we changed the name just recently actually, because it just kind of better suits where we wanna go and the direction we wanna take the business. So the Woodland Worm Co. is a relatively new name. I am a, I like to say I'm a jack of all trades, but master of none.

00:58
I have a really varied background, none of which is actually in worm farming. I'm an accountant, diesel mechanic, drummer, you name it, I can do it, I can fix basically anything. But I found myself in a place where I didn't have anything to be passionate about two years ago.

01:27
believe it or not, I stumbled across the Facebook post from a friend of mine that's Liz out in California. And he was just talking about random odd jobs or random weird family histories. And one of the folks, one of his friends,

01:49
put up a comment basically saying, yeah, my dad used to be a worm farmer. And I didn't know that was even a thing, to be honest with you. And so he, that guy's father wrote a book with his uncle back in the 70s. And I found the book amazingly twice online and I bought it. And it showed up in the mail one day while I was at work. And my wife said,

02:19
earthworms. And yeah, and I said yes, I did. And then a month later, I had worms. And here we are now. So two years later, I'm, I built the business. And we're really, really very in its infancy right now. So it's interesting, fun, exciting, and busy. I bet. So, so tell me.

02:47
Tell me how you begin raising earthworms.

02:53
So there's, when it comes to raising worms, there's different methods that you can do, but it all really comes down to a few, several key elements, right? The earthworms that I raise and most of the industry raise are composting worms. So they live within the first six inches of the soil.

03:21
right, they're horizontal movers, they don't really go up and down, they don't burrow up and down. They burrow horizontally and they eat the dead and decaying material that's on the surface of the ground. So if you know you really just need good food, which is usually for us, we feed compost.

03:47
um finished leaf compost and a grain mix or worm chow if you will and uh plenty of moisture and really you just give them a place where they can grow and be happy and not overpopulated and the worms they do their thing. It's really not complicated but it's easy to make it complicated. Okay and then

04:14
I guess my next question is, do you have bins that you have them in or do you have them outside in the ground or how does it work? So I tried several different breeds of worms before I actually started selling. My focus with the business is I want to build soil and make the soil great in your gardens.

04:43
so we can all eat better and eat healthier. So my focus is on producing the best worm castings there are. The way of which I raise, I use a breed called African nightcrawlers. And where I'm at in the country, we have really cold winters, so they don't survive outside. So I raise them,

05:12
temperature controlled environment in my basement and they are raised in three and a half gallon buckets and I stack them about, oh, I got 60 buckets per pallet. So yeah. Wow. Okay. And you're in Pennsylvania. That's why it's cold. Yeah. All right. And then tell me about why the castings are good. If anyone doesn't know, earthworm castings are basically earthworm poop.

05:41
exactly it. It's it castings I didn't come up with the name someone did somewhere along the line. It's it's a warm fertilizer. It's just it's a soil amendment. What's good about them is think of it kind of like a probiotic for your soil. Right castings are they are living. There's organisms inside.

06:10
in those castings and that fertilizer, what you put into the soil, what happens is those worms break down all the micronutrients that create all this life in their poop and all that life is also breaking down other, it's breaking everything down in the soil.

06:38
to a point where your plants can then absorb it through their roots. So the poop is really just a vehicle if you think of it that way, of which you can infuse a lot of good things for your soil environment. All different types of microorganisms are in there that will, they just,

07:07
benefits of it far outweigh the work. Okay, so how do you collect the casting? So do you just do you just scoop out the dirt that they've lived in? Or how does it work? So the process that I use it's if you the best way that I can put it is it's I create a manufacturing environment to produce the maximum amount of worm castings.

07:37
for the worms that I have in the space that I have. So what I use, I use a mechanical sifter that has two screens on it. It's a quarter inch screen first, and I'll take a bucket and dump that on. And whatever passes through that quarter inch screen is, I'm sorry, what's left on that quarter inch screen rather, are all the worms.

08:06
and uneaten food stuffs that are too big to pass through. And so then I remove that screen and then I have an eighth inch screen below that. And the only thing that passes through that eighth inch screen is the castings themselves. The cocoons that the worms have, they won't pass through.

08:33
maybe sometimes you get like little tiny baby worms will pass through or little types little tiny pieces of Compost will pass through but it's very minimal And okay, so basically you're mining for gold because because yours

08:51
Yeah, yes, actually, if you would search some bigger operations, these guys are using tronels just like in Gold Rush. I don't know if you're going to get any type of copyright thing, but if anybody's seen that show, it's kind of like that just on a small scale, really small scale. Okay. Your place must be a favorite with the local fishermen because you sell the worms as well, yes? I do. I sell fishing bait.

09:21
That's not as popular with the guys because right now where I am with the business, it's all about letting people know that I am actually here. That's the most difficult part I have found. The worms are easy and the worms are the fun part, but letting folks know that I exist in their neighborhood, that's really difficult, I have found.

09:48
Marketing is always the hardest part of starting a business. Always. Oh, it true words haven't been spoken because it's difficult to do and it's costly and it's an investment that for me, I had to be comfortable with making that investment for not a lot of immediate return. So the first year

10:17
was very slow, very difficult, and I was really just keeping the worms alive. This year, it's taken off a lot better than what I had planned to the point that I can't produce enough now. I'm selling out before I even have a harvest. And I harvest every two weeks. So I'm at the point where I have to add.

10:44
breed and I have to add more production units to keep up with the demand for castings. Who are you selling to? I mostly sell to home gardeners. They're my biggest customer. And then I have a few commercial gardeners and flower growers in the area that they'll buy much more quantities. They'll buy what I call bulk.

11:11
So 40 gallons or more at a shot. So I sell 40 gallon increments and also half yard and four yard super sacks. Okay. Well, it sounds like you got your marketing figured out that I still don't feel like I do. I don't think you ever do really. Um, I have a few folks right recently. I've had a lot of interest in, um, a lot of

11:40
marijuana growers have been taking an interest, which is something I wasn't expecting. So that's pretty neat. And yeah, it's been really fun so far. I am not up to date on my laws regarding marijuana right now. I know Minnesota just passed their law back last summer that we can have pot if we'd like it. We can grow it if we'd like it, but they're very small quantities allowed.

12:08
What's the law in Pennsylvania? I actually don't really know what the law is. In Pennsylvania, I don't believe you need to have a medical marijuana card. Okay. And you can grow, I believe the home grower can have one plant which can be consumed. Most of the folks that have reached out to me are from New York. So

12:37
I think the laws are much, are a lot easier than the commonwealth in New York. Okay. I was just curious because not all states allow it, but more states are coming on board. So yeah, it's actually becoming quite a popular thing now, which is pretty neat. You know, I think there's a lot of benefits to it and not to get political, but I do. I think there's a lot of health benefits that.

13:06
You know, it just makes people a lot more comfortable, especially if they're in a lot of pain. I personally know of a guy that's, he use, he medicates with marijuana and he has just a lot of physical and nerve issues and it helps him even just sleep, right? And it's like, wow, like you need this to just live. And so I think that there's a lot of great

13:34
benefits. I think there's a lot of potential there. I think there's a lot of trade and revenue that can be generated for a lot of other businesses. And there's just a lot of opportunity that I feel kind of like has to be explored in a way. Yeah, it's a window that's been closed for a very long time. Unfortunately, yes. Yep. Okay. So...

14:02
to get off that subject and on to the next. Not that it matters, it's not a big deal. I just was curious because you brought it up. Do you guys have the jumping worms in Pennsylvania that we have in Minnesota?

14:17
We do, to my knowledge. I have not seen any. Okay. In fact, I know very little about those jumping worms. I hear they are just terrible for the soil. And I really hear that they cause a lot of damage, but I'm not really up to par with that.

14:42
I hear the same thing. I have not seen one here yet. But I'm real, real aware when someone has, let's say, iris rhizomes they're trying to get rid of and they want to give them away. If I'm going to take them, I make sure that I shake all the dirt off the rhizomes before I put them in because the last thing I want to do is put jumping worms in my three-acre property because that would be really bad. Yeah, listen, if there are anything like the worms that I...

15:14
they will breed fast. The composters breed amazingly fast. And if you, I can see the, I can understand the fear really, if you put one in there, then it's gonna just be a steady slope, right? If you let them slip in, so super important. Yep, so anybody out there, somebody offers you roots of plants to put in.

15:41
and you have jumping worms in your state and it's been confirmed, be real careful. But listen, honestly, it's.

15:52
It's an opportunity then to create better soil, right? Like you can then amend the soil. Now I don't know if there's been any studies about this, but I'm sure there's ways to amend it. I just don't know what those ways are. Yeah, I just want to keep our dirt, our soil, the way it is right now. I don't want to mess with it because it's putting out really good produce every summer. Oh, it's fantastic.

16:18
I'd like to stay where we are at with that level. Thank you very much. Great. Okay. So, I swear I saw something about horses on your website. Yes. We have, they are pets. And another, one of the benefits of getting into worm farming is that your worms will eat your manure. Mm-hmm.

16:47
So I have, going back to an earlier question, I tried three different breeds of worms. I have red wigglers and I also have European night crawlers. Those two I keep outside in outside bins and I compost our horse manure. And that's what I feed those guys. And oh boy, do they love it. They love it.

17:17
I would imagine. So I don't want to, you don't have to tell me specifically the answer to this question, but do you have a lot of land or a little land or what? We have currently just under seven acres.

17:35
four of the seven are wooded. So there's really not much that I can do with that. The rest is used currently with composting our gardens, our chickens, sheep, and our horses. Nicole Sook Okay, so you are a homesteader too. You're not just a worm wrangler. You have critters.

18:04
completely build this into a completely sustainable environment. We want to produce food. We want to be able to feed all of our animals on the same property. Now we can't do that here, right? I don't have enough land to make hay and do all that. But what we are doing right now is

18:31
We're making the best of what we can and we're trying to do everything possible that we can to just stay in our little bubble. Yep. And we love it. You know, I truly enjoy it. When you see your vegetables popping up and they're going crazy, it's like, wow. Like, man, you can feed your whole family then.

19:00
of tomato sauce and whatever you want to make out of just tomatoes for an entire year. And there's, I just think there's something to that, you know? It's magic. It really is. We have tomato babies, siblings, that are about four inches tall on our kitchen table right now. And every morning the grow light gets turned on and I stand there and look at them and I'm like, you guys are going to be making tomatoes here in about three months. I'm so excited.

19:30
Yeah, they will pop, right? Yep. And we have baby basils coming and I've said a billion times on this podcast and I'm going to say it again, I love basil. I use it in a lot of food that I cook. And the little baby basils are cute. When they come up, they're just two little leaves and they're very dark green and I love them. I don't know why, but every time I see them, when we put the seeds in and they sprout, I just stand there and look at them and think, man, this is magic.

20:00
May 15th we start putting things into the actual garden and by June 1st everything is in and it's starting to do what it does and I stand there and look at that garden and it just it doesn't look like anything that it's gonna look like in two months and so I take the snapshot in my head of what it looks like June 1st

20:25
and then come August 1st, I'm like, you guys did so great. Yeah, it's really incredible. It really is. My wife and I, we were looking at our garden, especially the tomatoes, and we just saw them, they were the biggest tomato plants we ever had. And they were taller than we were, and now we're short people, so that's not much to say. But...

20:55
It was, it was just truly amazing. And I just haven't, I was in awe of how much, how much they were producing and how well they were growing and we even planted, we just put seeds right into the ground and they were, they did so well, so well, which is just an indication of your soil's health. Right?

21:24
If you have soil that is good, you will grow just the most beautiful, beautiful plants. They really will. It's amazing. Yeah. And not to take away from your business, because I think that worm castings is brilliant for fertilizer, but we use chicken manure and we use goat manure in our garden. And honestly, any manure that isn't...

21:51
I don't know, a dog or a cat or I guess any animal that eats meat, it's always great. And I'm not even sure that dog poop is a terrible fertilizer. I don't know why we don't use all manure as fertilizer. Maybe you do. I'm not really sure. I know typically.

22:20
You know, you're using horse manure or cow manure, but I believe that's usually the focus because of what they're eating, right? They're eating what we are harvesting from the ground already. And then you're just taking that and you're putting it back into the earth, right? You're taking the nutrients that are in that fertilizer and you're putting that back right into the thing that you're gonna grow more.

22:49
and more food for your animals. The ultimate recycling system, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's why a lot of folks, a lot of farmers, especially now, are going no-till, right? Like they don't like tilling up the earth because it just destroys everything. You zap the earth of the nutrients, you kill literally everything in there. And if you go no-till, you're putting a whole lot of fertilizer down. And I think

23:18
I think that there's something to that. I really do. And even folks that just do rotational grazing, right? And they're not making hay or they're not doing other crops. They're just rotating their animals through pasture land at the appropriate times. And that is, there's research out there that is just showing that that is such a great way of farming.

23:47
It's completely revolving and sustainable. Yeah, and there's so many different ways to farm. I mean, there's the hugelkultur thing. There's no till. There's what we do. We till it like twice in the fall after we pull everything out with our little tractor. And then we put the hay and the chicken droppings on top of it all winter. And it cools the manure down and then we just plant in the spring.

24:16
There's so many ways to do it. And I don't know. I don't know if there's a best way or if, if you're just trying your best, good on ya. You know, it's funny. I, I, I purchased my hay from a really good friend of mine. And I had told him that, you know, we have some property at a, at a, at a vacation home. And I have been working this land, trying to get it to.

24:45
to grow my own hay and do my own hay operation up there. And I had asked the guy and I said, how do you make really great hay? And you know what's funny? All he said was, I just try my best. And you know what, such a simple answer, but so much truth in that, right? That's all you can do is just try your best. And if it doesn't work, you know what you're doing? You make a change, you make an adjustment.

25:14
and you see what happens. I love that. I love that experimentation. I love that problem solving that comes with growing your own food because not everything is going to work and you're going to have ups and downs and you're gonna have mess ups. And I just like that. I like that process of learning. It excites me. Yeah.

25:41
I am a lifelong learner. I have perpetual curiosity. I can't stop myself. I can't help it. And so when we bought this place three and a half, almost four years ago, I'm going to start saying almost four years ago, we bought it in August of 2020. I was so excited because we knew enough to not be dangerous, but we didn't know enough to be bored. That's great. That's a great way of putting it. I like that.

26:10
And so it was really exciting because there was nothing here. It was a, a, a clean slate for us to start brand new. And this is our fourth spring here and so excited to get going on things. And we're in Minnesota, you're in Pennsylvania, you know, that you can't really get stuff in the ground outside until after danger of the last hard frost. So.

26:36
So we still have like a month and a half to go. And my husband's chomping to the bit because he's the gardener. Yeah. Yeah, I totally get it. It's that you never know when, unfortunately when that last frost is going to be. And I tell you what, the past two years we messed that up. Oops. You know, you just went too early and then you get a random cold snap. And you're like, oh no. And so totally get it. Totally get it.

27:06
Yeah, that's why we plant our stuff from seed because we stagger plant and that way if we lose some of them, we have more to put in. Right, right. It just saves us a lot of heartache and a lot of money because last I checked at the nurseries I think two or three springs ago, a tomato seedling was like $5 and a pack of seeds is like a buck and a half. So you do the math. You know how this goes. Yeah.

27:36
store and I saw tomato seedling for eight dollars. Oh my. Can you believe that? And they couldn't keep them on the shelf. Yeah, and that's because people don't, I think people don't realize they can start them from seed in their house. Yes. It's very easy to do as well. Yep. You know. Yeah, it really is.

28:00
So anyway, so what's the plan for Woodland Worm Company? Are you guys gonna stay at the place that you're at and just keep expanding there? Are you gonna eventually maybe look for a bigger place with more pasture land? Yeah, so the dream is to move up to the, where our property is, our vacation property is. We want to...

28:32
We want to have a fully, a farm that people could come and visit and be interactive. They can do all the things there, pick pumpkins, you know, apples, everything. We want them to be able to come enjoy themselves. We have dreams of having like a play place there that the kids can, their kids can go, they can grab a bite to eat or whatever, you know.

29:00
they can sit down have some lunch and just enjoy themselves. And that's something that we really enjoy going to places like that. And we want to offer that to other people. We want to invite folks to our home and just kind of be part of the family. And that's our vision. So we won't always

29:29
The next step is to build the business, the worm casting business to a point that is sustainable enough that we can move and handle that move. I don't know how quite yet, but we'll figure that out. Okay, so is teaching people about this stuff in your plan? Absolutely. Good.

29:59
I went to a worm farm down in Phoenix, Arizona, back in January, and it was for a worm business conference, believe it or not. They actually have those. The place that hosted us was called the Arizona Worm Farm. And if anybody has a second, I highly encourage to check them out if you ever visit Phoenix.

30:28
totally go check them out. They are an amazing, it's an amazing educational experience. They are the most open people about how they do things, why they do things, when they do things, and they really just love to share the information that they have, and they are just committed to the same thing.

30:58
values that I believe you and I have, right? They just want to have a self-sustaining place, and they want to grow great things, and they want to help the people in the city of Phoenix grow just wonderful plants in a place where you it's really difficult to grow, actually. Yes, yes it is. My son just moved to Nebraska from Phoenix back in December.

31:27
because he could not grow a hot pepper, let alone anything else on his little property that he had. He tried for like three years and he just was like, we need to be back in the Midwest. You know what? It's, I was shocked. This place is in the middle of a, their neighbors are, they do traditional farming techniques. I believe they farm cotton.

31:57
And so you'll have cotton farm on either side of this farm and the soil on those farms, it's just this dry, really light colored, just no health in that soil. And they were working those fields while I was even there. And then you look at the worm farm and what they've been doing with their own compost that they make and sell.

32:25
and put into their own ground. And it looks like you would be in a different part of the country. It's night and day different, yeah. Truly the most amazing thing, and it was jaw dropping for me. And I have to be honest, going there gave me the vision and it gave me the...

32:52
It let me know that it's possible. Like what I want to do is possible. And if someone in Phoenix can do it, you can do it anywhere in this country. I, I'm convinced of it. Yeah. And I think had he had he had that idea or had seen something about it, he might've tried it, but I also think that they really just wanted to move back to the Midwest, so it's all good. They're only like five, five, six hours away now, instead of.

33:21
a day's drive away. So it's great. Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I'm going to wrap this up because I usually try to keep these to half an hour. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Yeah. I love what you're doing. Keep on keeping on. Thanks. All right. Have a great day. Thank you. You too. Bye.