How To Raise (Setup) White Worms For Fish Food

White worms are an excellent live food choice for fish keepers or aquatic amphibians. They are usually used to encourage fish spawning behavior, and most aquatic creatures love feasting on white worms, including Guppies, Tetras, Platys, Plecos, Shrimp, Swordtails, and all fish really.

To get started, you will need a starter culture; below, I will go through everything you need to know to raise your new worms and keep an endless supply of live food at home.

Setting Up Your White Worms Container

• Container & Lid / Wooden Box
• White Worm Starter Culture
• Potting Soil / Garden Soil
• Peat Moss
• Boiling Water
• A Little Plastic Mesh Screen
• Cool Dark Location
• Spray Bottle (For Maintenance)
• Small Plastic Mesh Screen (For Harvesting)

The container can be the size that suits your setup and space. Your lid must have holes to allow everything to “breathe” on the inside. The lid also works well to keep the moisture inside, as you need to keep the moisture levels so that it isn’t dry, but it isn’t wet either; it is just moist if that makes sense.

When using a plastic container, you must be more careful with how much water you add. Another problem you could face is little flies like midges or nats. To prevent this, you can cover your lid holes with stuffing material that will still allow ventilation, but nothing will enter.

Some people keep their worms in a wooden box with a glass cover; this is the traditional way. They find it easier to regulate the moisture in the box and minimize the risk of too much moisture destroying the worm culture. Do not use plywood; rather, opt for pine boards. The other advantage of using a wooden container is the fact that the excess water sucks up into the wood and keeps everything cooler.

A cool, dark location works best for these worms, as they are happiest at lower temperatures (55-70F or 12-21C). They do not do well with heat, and you risk losing the culture if your container gets warmer. Temperature is a crucial part of keeping white worms.

Your soil needs to be a 50/50 mix of your choice of soil (garden, potting, or topsoil) and peat moss. You would need enough of this mix to cover your container of choice with about a three-inch-deep layer. To avoid unwanted gnats, it is best to sterilize the soil and peat moss before adding them to the container.

To sterilize your mix, add boiling water to your peat moss, lay out your soil in an oven-safe container, and bake it for about 30 minutes to an hour at about 300 F (150 C). Once your soil is sterilized, you can wet it and combine it. You should be able to form a ball when you squeeze it in your hand, but it should be dry enough that no water is dripping from your hand.

Your spray bottle will come in handy when maintaining your worm container. The best option is to use dechlorinated water. You can either add dechlorination drops to your water or use clean rainwater.

Once your soil is sterilized, mixed, moist, and placed in the container, you can add your starter white worms to the soil and prepare for your first feeding.

What Do I Feed White Worms

Oatmeal, small fish food pellets mixed with non-fat Greek Yogurt (Plain) that states “contains live active cultures” on the back (under ingredients), as you need the live bacteria to feed your worm army.

The quantity of each ingredient doesn’t matter; you can mix your ingredients in a ratio that works for you. You don’t need a lot of fish food pellets in the mix, so think of the pellets as “the seasoning” to the food.

New cultures don’t eat a massive amount of food, so you can start by adding a lump of your food mix to the center of the container and then securing the mesh screen over it. I like to move the food lump location around in the container.

After harvesting the worms, I add a new lump of food in another area and then secure the mesh screen onto the food by applying some pressure. It must make surface contact so the worms move onto the screen.

Check on your worms regularly to ensure their food doesn’t run out; I add a lump of food to my container every second or third day, depending on the age of my worm setup. The longer you have the worms, the more they seem to eat.

The only reason I ensure the food doesn’t run out is that it makes harvesting the worms so simple. I will explain that in more detail below.

How To Harvest White Worms At Home

Here is where that little plastic mesh screen comes in handy.

If you regularly check on your worms, add food when needed, and use your little mesh screen over your food, your worms will be on the mesh screen. You can then get a bowl of water and place the mesh screen in the bowl to harvest the worms quickly and easily.

Shake excess water off your mesh screen before placing it back into the container, as you don’t want too much moisture in your white worm container. You can now add more food and set the mesh screen over the food again.

You will see that there might be a little dirt in the water, so you can rinse the worms by pouring them into a very fine mesh strainer (remember, there are some tiny worms in the mix). Once you have rinsed the worms, add them to dechlorinated water or water from your fish tank to pour the whole lot into your fish tank. I like to use my dedicated turkey baster to suck a portion up and feed my fish like that.

It is entirely up to you how you want to portion it to your fish, but the turkey baster works well for me, especially if you have a few tanks and need to give a bunch of fish a snack. Some people even use a dedicated syringe to suck up a portion of worms from the water.

If you didn’t check on the worms often enough and they finished all their food under the mesh screen, they would move back into the soil, which makes harvesting a little more complicated. You would now have to scoop them up or pick some off the soil and rinse them, as mentioned above. It is a bit more rinsing than anyone would like to do, as you have more soil accompanying the worms.

Keeping White Worms And The Maintenance Requirements

White worms require very little maintenance; you need to ensure their soil stays at a good moisture level and that they stay in a cool, dark area. It would be best to ensure the soil’s moisture each time you give food so you can spray (mist) a bit of water over the soil area if needed.

You should stir up the soil every two to three months to keep it loose and distribute the worm droppings. The worm droppings will mostly accumulate around the feeding areas, have an odor, and tend to acidify the soil.

To ensure you control the odor and acidity of the soil, I suggest feeding your worms twice on one side of your container around the one-year mark. You can then scoop out the other side of the soil where you haven’t fed the worms and use that soil for potting soil. Replace the removed soil with new soil and feed on that side twice a row, then remove the other half and replace it with the new mix.

If you ever want to expand your worm population, you can remove some of the worms from your plastic mesh and add them to a newly set-up container.