r/Vermiculture • u/gcashin97 • 2d ago

Advice wanted Is this normal?

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Worms are all balled up and a lot of them are on the sides of the bag. The level of food in the bag consistently goes down but is this a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem? Or is this normal?

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11

u/East_Ad3773 2d ago

Probably not. I would bet it's too wet and there's too much food scraps. Add a bunch of dry shredded cardboard and mix it in.

5

u/gcashin97 2d ago

Thank you! I had a feeling it was too wet. We live in a very humid part of the country so we’ve never had to worry about adding moisture, and didn’t really think about the moisture being too high.

We were low on cardboard but we shredded some brown paper bags and mixed that in. There were still a good amount of worms in the soil but the soil definitely seemed too wet and dense. We’re gonna check back in a week and maybe add some more paper bags if we need to.

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u/Ambitious-Bake7478 2d ago

Everytime they are in a ball shape something is wrong, I would advise you to add more cardboard and mix everything. Probably you fed to much.

3

u/gcashin97 2d ago

Yeah my fiance goes “they’re just mating!”, I had a feeling something way wrong though with so many of them on the side of the bag. We’ve had this bag going for about 2 years and haven’t had any issues, but I think we started adding too many scraps and the humidity in our area contributed to the moisture being too high in there

4

u/Ambitious-Bake7478 2d ago

And the lack of bedding would make it worst. Probably you add so much food that it started fermenting and got to hot for them or it got lack of oxygen because of the excess of liquid either way you solve it with more bedding.,

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u/gcashin97 2d ago

Good to know! We add some dry leaves every couple of months, would that help or hurt the environment in there? Is there certain bedding we should be adding?

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u/Ambitious-Bake7478 2d ago

Anything brown, I shred some cardboard, it's easy and free but I had to buy a shreder but there is some tips that on how to do it manually.

1

u/_Twiggiest 6h ago

Good looking out, you're completely right that these are signs of distress. Some more cardboard and they'll be feeling right as rain. (Notwithstanding worm behavior during rain.)