Worm farm - fast maintence

Worms are a mystery to many people but if you have a small bucket of compost worms, you can create a worm farm that will help you get rid of a lot of your kitchen waste and newspapers while giving you a really beneficial end product. Having a worm farm allows us to create very good fertiliser here at home. Used in conjunction with other organic fertilisers like homemade compost, animal and chook manures and herb teas, we can grow whatever we like here without buying commercial chemical fertilisers.

Using worm castings in your garden will improve the structure of your soil, will help it retain moisture and will add microbes which help make the nutrients already in the soil available to the vegetables you plant. You will get better growth, healthier roots and bigger harvests using worm castings.

I have written about setting up a worm farm here, today I want to write about fast worm farm maintenance. The end product of a worm farm, the reason you keep worms, is for the worm casts - this is called vermicompost or vermicasts, which is just another name for worm manure. Once you've had those worms chomping away on food, paper, manure and straw for a few months, you'll want to harvest the castings. My problem was Hanno needed the castings for the garden and I didn't have time to harvest them. I wanted to empty the bathtub, sift the gravel on the bottom, because I know a lot of worms are living in there, reset the filter cloth on top of the gravel and build up the bedding again. No time for that, so I did a bit of fast maintenance.

BTW, you should never hose out your worm farm. Over time, the farm will build up beneficial bacteria, just like yoghurt and sour dough starter does. The longer it stays undisturbed, the better it gets. So your normal maintenance is cleaning the outside, making sure you don't have too many spiders, or rats, and generally checking the worms are healthy, the filter cloth is doing it's job and nothing has made a nest in there. There is little cleaning as such.

I didn't feed the worms for a month, making sure they ate every bit of food and last weekend I divided the farm in two. I wanted to create a pile of worm castings, containing the worms, and a pile of food that will draw them away from the castings side and into the food side.

When I opened the worm farm this is what I saw. You can't see any worms, they hate light and have buried themselves deep within.

I picked up the filter cloth - which is very strong - and tumbled the castings from one side to the other. Then, with my gloved hands, I moved the rest of the castings and a few worms over to that side. In the photo above, you can see the filter cloth on the bottom of the farm. Under that is gravel. Now all I had to do was create a paradise of food and bedding to lure to worms into it.

I used straw to do that, but I could also have used shredded paper, or a combination of potting mix and cow or horse manure. That mix, even without adding "food" is enough to bring them over. Worms love chewing through paper, straw and manure.

The straw must be soaked before hand. I didn't have any animal manure, and the chook poo we had was too fresh, so I added a couple of hand fulls of blood and bone to the straw and put a little worm juice over it to move it in. Last, I picked up the top layer of straw and tipped in the kitchen scraps from the day - a little bit of bread soaked in water, peelings from carrots, chopped up celery, half eaten egg and old cake. I replaced the straw, then covered it with soaked newspaper and an old towel that had been soaked in worm juice.

That is luxury accommodation for worms. I have no doubt they would already be moving from the castings over to the food. In a week or two, most of them will be on the food side and we'll be able to use the castings on the garden. I would estimate there are about 8 buckets of worm castings - the best fertiliser for any vegetable garden. That's not bad for a system sitting in a bathtub and run mainly on kitchen scraps, moist straw and old newspapers.