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Experiments and ponderings



I have been playing in the pet room and decided to try a couple of
things.

1) Added a whole bunch of heavily chopped up leaves (by lawn mower) to
my somewhat unproductive white worm culture. It has been a few weeks now
and the leaves are teaming with white worms. They may have always been
there in the soil but I could never find more then a few. Only trouble
now is figuring out a method of harvesting them.

2) Added a whole bunch of compost (last years mowed leaves) to my
redworm culture. Seem to be happy and I threw in a few whit worms just
for fun. I seem to be finding lots of both. But again hard to harvest
since they don't congregate in any one particular spot.

3) Got bored or lazy or something. Added a whole bunch (18+) of adult
crickets to red worm culture (see #2). I figered I would pour their food
directly onto compost and either they or worms could eat it. After 3
weeks only 7 crickets left so they became frog food. I started probing
and I did find lots of cricket eggs. This is what I was hoping for. So
what I am wondering is does any one know a minimum temp for the
succesful hatching of cricket eggs? These are the tipical commercial
guys and I do know that they like a higher temps. I also relize that the
eggs will take much longer (if at all) to hatch. This could be a
complete disaster Or it may work well. My worms are in a large plastic
rubermaid container so the crix cannot (easily) climb the sides. My lack
of time usually seems to botch any real attempts at cricket breeding so
I order a box of (1000) 2 week olds every 6-7 weeks.

4) Has any body ever had their grindle worms come back after a really
bad mold out break? My culture had a severe mold out break and I have
not seen any since. I know many molds produce toxins so They may be
gonners. I was only maintaining a small population. I used half of old
dirt with about twice as much new dirt and this has been going for over
a month. New food molds and never a sign of worms:-(

Thats about it for now. I'll do a fallow up later if there is anything
good to report.

Jeremy