Raising European Nightcrawlers as bait the cheap way.
This time of the year is great to start breeding worms as temperatures are now more suitable. For those who are into fishing, have you considered breeding worms for bait? While a lot of the commercially sold bait worms are soil dwellers caught in the wild, some of them are actually compost worms such as the African or European Nightcrawlers. Both are great used as bait but the European Nightcrawlers or ENC have a firmer flesh and would stay longer on the hook and are also easier to breed. By breeding your own bait, you not only fish cheaper but you can also compost your kitchen scraps at the same time.
Breeding European Nightcrawlers from cocoons or from mature worms?
Both ways are possible but here are some pros and cons for each.
Breeding from cocoons is cheaper to start with, however it will take you longer before you can harvest some live bait for your hobby. This especially true with ENC worms that have a much longer breeding cycle than other compost worms. In a previous experiment I only started noticing an notable increase in juvenile worms after about three months. But if time is not critical and you are willing to wait, then this method is my favourite because while Mature worms do not like drastic changes in their environment their offsprings will adapt very well even when hatched into a totally different type of environment their parents were used to.
Starting with a bunch of mature worms( breeders) will allow you to have a small reserve of bait at the start. Say you begin your worm breeding adventure early Spring and go and buy 100 worms, if all conditions where right you should in Summer time have about a thousand cocoons, a lot of of which would have hatched already but the worms are still small, you can now pick some of the initial breeders and go wet the line in the local river, then by Autumn the babies would have grown big enough for some more sessions.
The breeding container
Because this is not a commercial operation where you need to focus on optimising the yield, you don ' t need any special containers or techniques. All you need is some shallow plastic container, something between 4 and 7 inches would do fine. I started with small trays that were just 1 sqft but the more surface area the better, I ' m now using those affordable under bed plastic storage boxes that have wheels. Their depth is perfect and they have a decent size but being transparent they need to be placed indoors in darker room or be covered with a sheet of cardboard.
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