All of our worms are bred, grown, picked and shipped by Watsonia Worms.

We grow three species of worms:

European Nightcrawlers (Dendrobaena vent/Eisenia hortensis)

Tiger Worms (Eisenia fetida)

Andrei Worms (Eisenia andrei)

European nightcrawlers can be effective for use in worm farms, but are primarily sold as fishing bait.

Meanwhile, tiger worms are the popular choice for vermicomposting, with the worms eating all the vegetable waste you put in your worm farm, thereby producing all those lovely worm casting for your garden.

Tiger worms tend not to make very good fishing bait and generally are not very palatable to your turtles and axolotls.

All three types of worms are epigeic, meaning they are not true earthworms, as they don’t burrow deep into the earth. Instead, they tend to prefer to live in leaf litter or other types of loose, carbon-rich material. This means they can be efficiently farmed rather than collected in nature.

Our own worms are farmed in large wooden bins using a bedding mixture which consists mostly of coconut coir straw and shredded cardboard. The worms are fed on a worm chow of milled grain, animal feed and inputs such as soy meal.

Our European nightcrawlers hatch and develop in their breeding bins, and after growing for approx. 8-10 weeks, they are separated by size into fresh growing bins for a further period of 4-6 weeks.

After this, they are harvested into fresh bedding once more and fed a protein-rich worm chow until they reach bait size, and are ready for sale.

Our tiger worms are grown in similar bedding to the European nightcrawlers, and are fed a similar diet. However, they are kept strictly separate and are harvested to order directly from the grown bin.