What To Do When Your Worms Arrive in the Mail
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The Shipping Process
Consider the dangers of wearing wet clothing in cold weather. The same clothing, if dry, would keep you perfectly warm.
Or consider touching a hot pan with a wet oven mitt instead of a dry one. It'll burn you pretty quick!
These same principles apply when shipping worms across the country. The more moisture in the shipment, the more the worms are affected by outside conditions.
So to create a protected microclimate for them to travel through the U.S. Postal System in, the worms are dehydrated and insulated with dry peat moss.
If I have done a good job, your worms will arrive looking dehydrated, but alive.
With some hydration and nutrition, the worms will bounce back rather quickly.
Adding the Worms to a New Home
Step 1: Make sure the worms are alive
If the worms have "expired" in shipment, it will likely be very obvious by sight and smell. Worms are 90% water by weight and the other 10% of them is mostly protein, so when they die they begin to decompose quite quickly. The smell will likely be the first tip the worms died. Or, if COVID took out your sense of smell, it's pretty obvious by sight too as they'll look like a sludgy mess. It's not great.
Luckily dead shipments are quite rare, and if your worms arrive dead contact me ASAP. As long as the worms weren't left unattended to for too long, I will reship them at no cost to you. See our red wiggler page for more details.
Note that in winter months, the worms might not be moving when you first get them. This is often because of the extreme cold. If you're concerned that they died just let me know and we'll keep an eye on it.
Step 2: Place the worms onto their bedding
If you read or watch my content, you know that I'm a big advocate for learning to listen to your worms.
You shouldn't hear any voices (please contact someone if you do!), but they can tell you if they like their new home or not by burrowing into it, or avoiding it.
If the worms burrow directly into the bedding, like in the time lapse video below, you're golden!
Or, if the worms seem to travel horizontally across the surface of the bedding and seem to be avoiding burrowing into it like in the video below, something may be off. Reach out to me and we'll troubleshoot!
Had we not given the worms the chance to communicate with you, and forced them into an environment that they didn't approve of, it could kill them. That's why I recommend that you give the worms options (such as to burrow into new bedding/food or not), and let them choose for themselves.
Step 3: Leave a dim light overhead.
For the first 0-4 hours or so, a dim light will nudge (without overly stressing) the worms and help quicken the process of seeing if the worms approve of their new home or not.
If the worms will not go into the bedding, even with the light on, something is definitely wrong. Again, contact me and we'll troubleshot.
But typically they'll burrow into the bedding in that time frame.
Once they do, keep the light on, but cover up your worm bin just as you'll have it be long term. (Place the lid on it, zip it up, or place a cover on it if you have once etc.)
Now we're doing a second test to make sure we're squared away here...
Step 4: Cover the Bin and Watch
Our first test was to see if the worms will go into the bedding when they have some dim light nudging them into it.
Now let's see if they'll stay in the bedding even without the light encouraging them to stay in it. We'll know if they actually like the bedding or if they were just tolerating it to get out the light.
For several hours (or overnight) leave the worm bin under a dim light so that the surface of the bedding is shaded (the bin has its cover/lid on) but if the worms were to try to escape the worm bin they would encounter the light and not end up on your floor.
NOTE: It's best to leave a light over the worm bin for the first couple nights for this reason anyway.
Once several hours has passed, crack open the lid/cover and see if the worms have all congregated back on top of the bedding, or if they're mostly submerged still.
If they're all mostly submerged, even without light to push them in, you're golden!
If they're gathered at the surface, or around the edges of the worm bin like they were trying to escape but the light stopped them, then it's time for some troubleshooting. Again, reach out to me we'll figure it out.
Step 5: Add Food and Study Up!
If you hadn't added food yet, go ahead and do it! Note that it will take some time for the microbiome to establish and for them to start working on the food, but you should be good to add it now.
From here just master the foundations of worm composting (you can find them here) and watch your waste turn into black gold for your garden!
Scott Kent
Owner of Hungry Worms. Worm farmer, soil microbiologist, and educator since 2014. Read more about me here.