An in-ground, home-made worm-farm costs next to nothing to set-up, takes next to no time to run and yet it turns your food-scraps into gold, aka worm-castings.
Worm-castings are good-for-everything! For sick plants, for strong seedlings, for tired soil – it’s no exaggeration to say that they have super powers. Team them with your homemade compost (your gardening dynamic duo), and your edible backyard will never look better.
Choose a container
Hunt about your local recycling centre for three or four 20-40litre bucket with lids. Or use old plastic plant pots and find a lid, a rubbish bin lid like the pic above, a sheet of ply or stack layers of cardboard topped with a folded up piece of shade-cloth, like the first photo.
Drill or punch loads of holes in the bottom.
Choose a good spot
Bury the bottom of your worm-farm about 5cm deep, just a little way into the soil. Its important to keep the farm warm – not hot, not cold. In the summer choose a semi shaded spot amongst plants, in the winter the greenhouse is fab or anywhere sunny.
Then make the most of the goodness that leaches out the bottom by dotting the farms throughout the vegie patch, or beside a citrus tree, or any other hungry plant like rhubarb. They go well where soil is tired, or to help start a new vegie bed. They’re so easy to move, you can easily change their position at any stage!
Set them up
In the bottom of your farm, spread a lovely 10-20cm layer of vermicasting’s or mature homemade compost or goey-rotten hay or my personal fav, well rotten manure. Which must be organic so it doesn’t have any residual worming products or antibiotics or other anti-worm/ anti-life nonsense in it.
Lay a few damp, broken down cardboard boxes over top the manure, and that’s it! Let’s farm some worms!
A good start
Compost worms are different to earth worms, they’ve pointed ends, stripes and move really quickly. They’re the worms that live in the litter and mulch and cow pats – their job is to consume and convert raw organic matter. Perfect for food scraps.
Buy compost worms online, or get an ice-cream containers worth from a friend. It’s good to start with lots, because lots of worms gobble more food-scraps faster.
Lift the cardboard cover and pop your worms into the centre, on top the manure. Sprinkle on a small amount of well chopped up food scraps and re-cover with the cardboard. As your worms feed and grow and mate and lay eggs, the population will increase. The more the environment is to their liking, the faster the population will boom.
It’s super important at the start to go slowly, to wait until most of the scraps are consumed before adding more. Keep in step with them, and in time you’ll have hoards of hungry worms that will easily gobble up loads of scraps.
Don’t include citrus skins or onions at the start – put them on your compost pile instead. A few here and there once the worm farm is going gang-busters will be sweet.
Be a worm farmer!
Check in on them everyday to say hey, and make sure the temperature and moisture levels are AOK. It’s rare that you’d need to water them, usually the food scraps are wet enough and the thick wet cardboard cover and lid keep the moisture in. It doesn’t take much to keep them happy.
- Spread food scraps out so they aren’t in a big dump in the centre.
- A very light sprinkle of lime or woodash over the foodscraps now and then will keep things nicely balanced. If you see lots of little flies, don’t panic, they’re all part and parcel of the wormfarm – just dust with lime.
- Card and paper are much beloved by worms, a good way to get rid of your secrets.
- As the cardboard cover starts to deteriorate, leave it for the worms to gobble up and replace it with a new layer. The card is important to stop the farm drying out.
- A few dollops of manure now and then will thrill your worms no end.
- Though these bins are hard to get into, don’t put it past rats to chew through. Get trapping.
When a bin gets full, set up the next one with a bed of manure. Move a few big scoops of worms over by hand + fresh food-scraps + a new cardboard cover.
Leave the finished bin alone until everything bar a few eggshells and avocado stones has been turned into delicious black, peaty castings. Success!
Use your worm-castings
A full bucket of vermi-castings is the bees knees. Use once nearly all the worms have vacated. It will look a little rougher and chunkier than the bought stuff but just you wait and watch it’s super immune boosting, cell strengthening, growth enhancing powers in action.
- Add to bought or homemade seed raising mix for strong seedlings,
- include in your bed prep to strengthen soil and boost new transplants,
- add to the soil beneath any plants or fruit trees that are unwell due to pests or disease.
Bring on the garden magic.
