Charlotte and Sadie Waterman’s profits go toward college and ice cream
SABATTUS – The young Waterman sisters started selling crawlers from their playhouse in May, after dad Jim discovered a bumper crop one night on the lawn, in the rain.
There were just hundreds of them – now kept in a roughly 2-by-2-foot wooden box in the basement.
That’s where they live, pre-sale.
Every couple of days, the girls bag up a few handfuls and restock their cooler. They sell them for $2.49 a dozen to passing fishermen. Each bag typically has two bonus crawlers (to make up for potential escapees).
Every two weeks, they change the dirt in the worm box, an hourlong chore.
“I just dive right into it,” said Charlotte, 7, dirt on her cheeks and nose serving as proof.
Sadie, 5, hung back and worked the hose, dampening the new compost.
Charlotte likes to let the big ones inch up her arm.
Sadie, not so much.
“They still make her squirm a little,” said mom Jen.
The night crawlers live in a special mix of composted cow manure, kitchen waste and sawdust shavings. The girls add new coffee grounds every day. Charlotte thinks they like the taste. “So we have really hopped-up worms,” Jen quipped.
Once they’re bagged and in the cooler, they need water, but not too much, and air, but not too much. When the worms crawled out through the paper-punch holes the girls put in the plastic bags, the girls switched to smaller air holes. Now they puncture the plastic with a toothpick-sized screwdriver.
They check on the worms in the cooler once a day, changing the ice, for pretty practical reasons, according to Charlotte:
“So they don’t die and then the cooler stinks. (Once) Sadie came to check on them and she was like, Eeech.'”
“Because they stinked,” Sadie said.
The girls have joined their dad and other family members a few times to pick night crawlers. Ideal conditions: 10 p.m. and rainy, in short grass, with a flashlight.
“You get the white end, so then you’re sneaky,” Charlotte said. “This end they can’t see you and you just grab them.”
But hold tight: They squirm, and they’re lightning quick.
“For every one you get, 10 to 20 get away,” Jim said. “You only get one chance. You don’t get a second change to grab a night crawler.”
Their playhouse is set up for self-service. Customers pull in the driveway across from Waterman Farm Machinery- marked with a “CRAWLERS” sign that the girls touch up every few weeks – and drop bills inside the playhouse window. Change goes in a hanging yogurt cup.
Every time a car leaves and the girls catch sight, they run from the house to check on the worms and the money. They’ve sold about 40 bags this summer. So far, every buyer’s been honest.
Occasionally, Jen said, they dip into profits by using the night crawlers to fish. The girls split their earnings, with money going toward college funds and ice cream.
They’ll keep up the little business until it’s too cold or too dry, or they run out of worms.
That may be a while. During a good rain two Wednesdays ago, Jim and Jen scoured the lawn again. “We got a couple hundred more,” she said.
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