"Coffee grounds make them horny," Stephanie Jones says, dumping a Folgers can of the gritty black goo into the dirt. The worm I'm holding starts to wiggle a bit, so I place it back in the wooden bin.
She plunges her hands into the soil, pulls out a small red wiggler and cups it in her hand.
"It's expecting," she says, pointing to a small white speck — the egg — on its abdomen.
That one egg, she tells me, can hatch into as many as 20 little worms. And worms can lay up to 900 eggs annually.
"If you start, say, January 1 with a pound of worms, by December 31 you will have a million worms," she adds.
Jones knows her worms. Maybe a little too well.
"I pray for my worms," she admits, giving me a sheepish grin. "And I spend a lot of time with them."
But you can't blame her for loving the squiggly fellows. That squishy mass of creepy crawlers is her livelihood.
Jones is a worm farmer. In fact, she is the only professional worm farmer in the Tampa Bay area.
"The official name is vermicologist," she schools me. "But the bottom line is, yes, I'm a worm farmer."
Jones isn't the first person to think up the idea of a worm farm. Hundreds are spread out over the United States and Canada. Florida has five large farms, most of them located in the north central region.
Worm farms used to cater only to the organic farmer and specialty greenhouse crowd. But in recent years, the rich compost generated by worms has become popular among regular consumers, educators and even municipalities looking to control landfills.
Cities like Burbank, Calif., have begun programs to give free compost bins to residents looking to control their "green material," something governments in Canada and New Zealand have done for years.
Worms make composting even more lucrative.
As nature's recyclers, worms can create a half-pound of compost for every pound of trash. The voracious eaters chomp through the dirt, sucking in organic matter and excreting "castings" — the formal term for worm shit.
Compost with castings is worlds away from the stuff you buy at the local uber-mart, Jones says. Some gardening stores sell the nutrient-rich compost for $18 per square foot.
"Compost is black gold," she says.
But Jones did not know any of this when she started her business in 1995.
She had just bought a small one-bedroom cottage without a garbage disposal on Lantana Avenue in Tampa. Environmentally savvy, Jones remembered a class she'd taken while earning her business degree at the University of South Florida in which the teacher had mentioned something about the benefits of compost heaps and the worms that inhabit them.
Jones' first worm bin was a shoebox under the sink, filled halfway with dirt and a handful of worms.
It didn't take long for her to move the multiplying creatures into a larger bin.
Around the same time, a contractor putting in her new windows noticed the compost heap and offered to trade some window work for the rich compost.
It was her first foray into the worm business.
"I found out there were no female worm farmers in the Southeastern United States," she says. "I thought to myself, 'Worms don't talk back, they don't bite and they're easily acquired.'"
And for Jones, who was on disability at the time, having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, worm farming seemed like the kind of home-based business she could handle.
From a dusty IBM computer, she came up with a name — Wiggly Worms LTD — and built a web site. Almost immediately, orders flooded in. The lone bin turned into 20 large wooden boxes, six feet long and three feet high.
At her peak, Jones was shipping out 500 million worms a year. She sent so many priority mail packages that the United States Postal Service featured her in a commercial. She bought a big rig and had a local tattoo artist paint the Wiggly Worm logo — a worm with a garden hat and hay in its mouth — across the side. She drove it across the United States, making worm deliveries on both coasts.
Essence magazine did a story on her. Working Woman followed suit. Even Fear Factor came calling; Jones' worms were fed to contestants in the TV show's first two seasons.
"At first, I was hesitant to lend them the worms," she says of the Fear Factor producers. "But I realized worms are used for various reasons and [the producers] needed my help."
Then one day in 2003, her multiple sclerosis relapsed.
"I woke up blind," she says, and couldn't get out of bed. The entire right side of her body was paralyzed. Abruptly, Wiggly Worms LTD stopped operations. The business floundered.
Jones takes a pitchfork and flips the soil over in the five bins that sit on her one-third-acre lot near Lutz, where she moved a year ago.
"This helps them to explore their environment, make love and regenerate," she says.
Jones normally spends an hour or two outside in the early morning, tending to her flock of worms. They have a schedule, you know.
On Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, she feeds them vegetables; Tuesdays and Fridays is coffee ground day.
"The Sweetbay produce manager donates produce to us that they would normally throw out," she says.
Jones wants to go inside. She is sweating profusely and apologizes. It is one of the ongoing complications of her MS.
But she is doing better. Last year, Jones decided to start the business up again with the help of her friend Tom Matthews, now vice president of the company.
"This Wiggly Worm business was all over the place," he says, reminiscing over the years he watched Jones build her worm empire. He was amazed at all the different industries that are dependent on what most people think of as bait, including the manufacturers of a contraption that gathers worms for harvesting.
"Can you believe there is a market for worm harvesters?" he asks, incredulous.
Matthews, who has a cole slaw venture on the side, said worms seemed like a good investment: low startup costs and a multiplying profit. Plus, you don't even have to pair the males and females — worms are hermaphrodites.
"Florida is a good state for the entrepreneurial spirit," he says.
So the two created another web site — www.wigglywormsltd.net — and started filling orders. Business is crawling, but Jones has reconnected with her old customers and found new ones. She recently became one of three compost suppliers to Pinellas County.
"Basically, we're trying to get it started again," Jones says.
Last week brought Jones even better news: Wiggly Worms LTD became a publicly traded corporation. Her shares sell for $10 each.
After the farming duties are out of the way, Jones checks her e-mail and fills any orders. She returns to the worm bin with a small scale and Styrofoam cup to weigh the order — one pound equals $25 — and prepares the wigglers for shipping.
Occasionally, Jones meets an unsuspecting person at the post office counter with no idea of what she does for a living.
"They laugh at me," she says. 'You're a worm farmer? Oh my God."
She mimics a squealing old lady.
"Yeah I am, and I enjoy it," she answers them. "It's the best job I've ever had in my whole life."
She shakes her head and laughs.
"It's worms, for God's sake! I can make a living on worms!"
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2006.