You have several options available. I'll tell you up front that the smartest, quickest, and most ethical way to acquire worms is to find your local worm farmer. However, in the interest of full disclosure, lets explore some other options.
First Full Disclosure on buying worms: you can collect worms for free.
The basic formula for red wigglers is decaying organics + topsoil + water + time = worms.
Just find an overgrown area of Earth (weeds and grass work great) and pile up a couple yards of pastured animal manure. Add a little water, cover the mound with cardboard or paper, and wait. Over time, it will attract red wigglers, you can dig them out and condense them in a worm bin, or just continue composting in the open dirt.
This method requires some initial labor, and it might be many weeks or even months until the worms move in, but it does work. You might only get a hundred worms, but that's enough to get started. Red wigglers are a force of nature, and as such, can be found everywhere on the planet where decaying organics cover the topsoil.
Second Full Disclosure on buying worms: you can buy worms on Amazon.
They'll ship you a little cloth bag full of shredded paper and big, fat worms. They'll probably charge a competitive price to the local worm farmers, too. This is actually how I got started, years ago, from a very famous mail order worm farm.
Mail order wigglers have their own set of problems, though.
First major problem, they send you only mature worms, usually in a sterile bedding medium, like non-composted coco coir and dry shredded paper (both of which can be great additions to a worm bin, but are not enough by themselves). This is done for marketing and shipping purposes, not because it makes healthier colonies. First time worm farmers generally expect a big gob a fat, mature worms, and commercial sellers will send you just that. Proper bedding is heavy and can be, frankly, kind of gross (to the uninitiated, I think it looks like solid gold). The extra weight of real, edible worm bedding drives up shipping costs, hence the skimpy, lighter substitutes. More to the point, sending the average Amazon buyer a box of rotting manure and vegetables might not go over so well in the reviews section.
Second big problem, a mail truck is not a worm bin. Worms don't want to be there. They may die from heat or cold exposure, depending on the time of year you order your worms, or lack of water, if your shipment gets delayed.
A gob of mature worms (ie nearing the end of their life cycle) in dry, inadequate bedding, after being cooked/frozen/shaken/crushed for a week in a mail truck, is not a great way to get started worm farming.
Third Full Disclosure on buying worms: "1000 worms" and "1 pound of wigglers" are good marketing, but they are a terrible way to judge the health of a colony.
I sell worms using these slogans, because customers feel more comfortable having a metric for what they are buying, and it makes comparison shopping easier. I do my best to honor these promises, but it's impossible--or rather, very impractical and counterproductive--to separate out individual worms, count them all, or provide a specific weight. The worms wouldn't like it, it's a waste of time, and it will result in a stressed, unhealthy colony. Worms don't want to be removed from their bedding; it is more productive to find active areas in your colony, and remove the heavily populated areas with their surrounding bedding. Obviously, this ups the weight a lot, and makes it impossible to determine the exact number of worms, but it is a much healthier way to separate and buy worms.
It's not possible to quantify a healthy colony with a simple metric like population or weight. Don't worry too much about the total number of worms. It's a very difficult thing to determine in a healthy, properly fed colony. A healthy, well fed, diverse colony with only a few hundred worms can easily overtake a poorly set up colony with thousands of stressed, elderly, mail order worms.
It makes a for a better photo-op when you see a wiggly, squirmy ball of worms, but it doesn't necessarily mean your colony is healthy. Often, it means a shortage of food, or problems with temperature and humidity. Worms don't want to live in solid gobs; they burn through their food source quickly, and are vulnerable to mass die offs or escape attempts when they are overcrowded. They need to spread out a bit to maintain colony health.
Instead of worm-counting, look for signs of colony health, or colony distress. Are the worms active, red, and wiggly? Or do the worms look lethargic, glassy, or slightly melted? Are they crawling through the bedding, or trying to escape up the sides of the bin? Are there mature worms, adolescents, babies, and cocoons in the colony? Is the bedding cool and slightly moist, or is it hot and dry, or cold and soggy? Is there an excess of finished castings? A lack of fresh worm food? Is the bedding loose and oxygen rich, or compacted and anaerobic?
Fourth Full Disclosure on buying worms: if profit is your endgame, think twice.
Worm castings are a very valuable commodity, as are the worms themselves. There are plenty of people in this world who make a good living with worms. I make money doing it, but it's not my only income source.
However, if you want to get deeper into worm farming than just processing your own kitchen and yard scraps, you need to be prepared for certain things. For example, how do feel about being covered in animal and worm feces? What's your feeling on shoveling up very large piles of rotting manure and vegetables in the Summer heat? How do you feel about the ants, spiders, beetles, flies, grubs, and various critters that really put the "vermi" in vermicomposting? Most importantly, are you willing to stick your hand straight into a worm bin and pull out a handful of live, crawling compost, pick through it, and maybe even give it a sniff?
People sometimes ask me if I'm worried about a customer "stealing" "my" "idea" (big quotes around all three words) and becoming my competition. My answer is always the same, "No, I'm not worried at all. In fact, I wish a lot more people would farm worms."
Worms are good for Mother Earth, plain and simple. In the end, all worm farming comes back to that. If your love of money is greater than your love of a happy, healthy planet, then professional worm farming is most likely not going to work out for you. There is money to made, yes, but there are trade-offs, too, most of which involve feces.
Fifth Full Disclosure on buying worms: wigglers are a seasonal crop.
Red wigglers don't do much during the Winter, because they don't like being cold. They often die off in large numbers after the first frost, leaving your bin with a skeleton crew to get through the cold months. They will continue to eat, though much more slowly, but they wont breed until temperatures rise in the Spring.
It can be helpful to keep your bins warmer in the Winter: put them in a sunny spot, cover them with a tarp, and avoid adding water. However, unless you make the jump to keeping your worms in a controlled environment--indoor worm farms can be expensive, energy intensive operations, and will invite lots of insects inside a building--then the bulk of worm farming happens from late Spring to late Fall.
If you are planning on setting up a worm bin during the cold months, don't expect too much action in the bin until Springtime.
Final Full Disclosure on buying worms: The difference between $10 of worms and $1000 of worms is not necessarily money, but always time and energy.
You don't have to buy a huge amount of worms to get started; they will multiply and eat faster than you probably realize, though only if you feed and care for them properly. With the right kind of care, a few hundred worms in March can breed into many, many thousands by September.
You can get more done faster with more worms, yes. However, worm composting is always a long term project. In the long run, even if you started with just a handful of worms, you can still accomplish great feats of vermicomposting.
GO LOCAL. Find the person(s) in your area raising worms. Check your local craigslist, farmers markets, and gardening clubs. It's probably somebody with 20 bathtubs full of worms in their backyard, or someone with 50 plastic tubs in their basement, or a horse owner with rows of manure covered in burlap, or someone with a shed full of 5-gallon buckets, or someone with rows of barrels half buried in the ground.... Worm farmers come in lots of varieties, but most have the same thing in common: they are more than happy to sell you a reasonably sized, healthy, diverse colony, as well as provide you with some information, direction, and inspiration. You won't find that on Amazon.
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