Can I Feed Rabbit Manure To Red Wigglers?
Posted by Store Owner on 12/14/2024 to
Rabbit manure can be an excellent food for worms. If you are lucky enough, it can also be either a free or low-cost option to keep your worm herd fed. Although this feedstock is excellent, precautions must be used to prevent killing your worms. Fresh rabbit manure is usually mixed with hay and wood shavings. These materials are good at absorbing excess rabbit urine, which is good for rabbit owners but bad for worms. The reason it can be bad for worms is because rabbit urine contains a high amount of sodium. Worms can be easily killed by this excess sodium if proper precautions are not taken. Luckily, rabbit manure can be rinsed of excess sodium with either a hose or rainwater. You can pile up the material on the ground and soak it down with a house until the runoff is clear. After this point, most of the sodium has been leached from the material and it is now safe to feed your worms. If you are more patient, you can stockpile the material outside and let rain also do this job. If you want to keep the material more contained, any plastic container with lots of holes drilled in it will do. You can either use a hose on the container containing rabbit manure till your runoff is clear, or just leave it exposed to the rain. Be warned if you decide to use this method- it smells worse than leaving the manure stockpiled on the ground, due to less airflow. It can be a good solution for adding the dry manure/bedding mix, watering the material, and then feeding it immediately. Be sure to feed this material buried in a strip down the middle if you have a small bin. The reason being is that the hay/manure mix can be very high in nitrogen and could get very hot in a short period of time. If this happens, the worms need a cool area to back off to, until the rabbit manure mixture cools down enough to be consumed.
Worms can also be housed directly under rabbit hutches in beds that contain shredded leaves, cardboard, pine shavings, old straw, or better yet, a damp mix of all these materials. You will need to remove the castings every few months and actively shovel out and remove areas where there is urine.
If you follow these tips you will have great success feeding rabbit manure to red wigglers. You will find that this material makes the worms breed well and grow quickly. The resulting castings are also of excellent quality.