Two-thousand worms in the closet

How much do you love your chickens?

Some people can't understand how I can eat my chicken friends - which I tried to explain earlier this week.

But, on the other side of the chicken-coin is how far I will go to make my feathered dinosaur-adjacent friends happy while they're alive (before I eat them.) So, I have recently added a new kind of farming to the repertoire; I'm now worm farming in my guest room closet. Yep, I'm taking "crazy chicken lady" to the next level.

Mealworms are high-protein wormlike creepy larval bugs that chickens go bananas for. If chickens had thumbs and bigger brains, they would break into all the mealworm farms and hold the humans hostage to farm them more product. On the days that I take mealworms out to the coop, I feel like nothing more than a drug dealer for my twitchy chickens.

In many ways, mealworms are an ideal chicken food. They're high in protein and fat, making chicken eggs even more delicious. The problem with mealworms is that they can get expensive really quickly. My sister-in-law got chickens a few weeks ago and hit the chicken aisle at the feed store. She got a small bag of mealworms (smaller than a breadbox) for $30 - about the cost of two 40-pound bags of chicken layer pellets. In the world of chicken-keeping, mealworms are a treat for a reason.

Mealworms are so expensive because they are relatively difficult to reproduce in large quantities, so it's hard to achieve the economies of scale that will drive the price down. They are, however, fairly easy to breed in small batches in Tupperware storage containers. So, to decrease the costs of chicken feed and solidify my place as the Queen of our chicken kingdom, I started a closet worm farm.

Mealworms are the larval stage of the Darkling Beetle. Did I think that when I got my first chickens, I would start keeping plastic storage totes full of beetles in my closet? No, this feels like the next level of chicken commitment. However, the feeling of unchecked power in providing a flock of followers with the ONE thing they want most makes the cost/benefit analysis of bugs in totes worth it.

By the way, getting drunk off the power of starting my own chicken cult predicated on a supply of my closet worms means that nobody should allow me to create a cult for humans - I wouldn't be a benevolent dictator.

Anyway, mealworm and beetle farming is not a particularly hard project to start. I first bought some storage totes of different depths that nest in one another. I drilled a few air holes, bought some substrate for the bottom of the totes, and replaced the bottom of the upper tote with a screen. We were ready to go.

Darkling beetles and mealworms thrive in high humidity, warm, and dark, and do the best feasting on grains and other vegetables. My goal for the best worm farming is to basically replicate the conditions of a Kentucky grain silo.

I found a warm week of weather and ordered my live mealworms from - where else - Amazon. The kids and I had fun releasing all the creepy crawlies into the container and watching them burrow into the wheat-bran-based substrate. Each son picked one worm of the approximately 2000 options as their "pet" worm. Both kids assure me they'll be able to identify their beloved pets in the crowd. I'm sure.

About once a week, I do a check to separate the pupae from the larvae. I then add carrots, celery, or a sliced apple to satisfy the worms' moisture needs. The pupae will eventually hatch into beetles, burrow down to lay their eggs on the screen (which will hopefully fall through and hatch with the worms below), and the process starts all over again. As long as I keep sorting bugs and adding veggies, we should have a constant loop of worms.

There is something, though, about starting a worm farm in my closet that makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing. I've wondered that more since starting urban farming than ever before in my life, but each time I lean in, I learn something new. Worm farming is just the latest.

If you see me out in the pasture surrounded by worshipping chickens while I dole out worms like a drug-dealing cult leader, remember, this is all part of the learning process.