In fact, I’ve got more than 20,000 worms! Not in me, but in my worm factory. They are composting worms and some of the most valuable assistants we have in our garden. Their products: worm wee and worm poo – worm castings – are wonderfully nutritious – and are free, and make plants thrive!
I purchased a three level factory and lid, bedding and 10,000 worms for $5 at a garage sale six months ago. Since then the number of workers has doubled. We have had buckets of wee and buckets of worm castings. Our vegetables, roses and flowerbeds are all flourishing.
The worms eat some of our organic waste! I give them a cabbage leaf, some scraps, some lawn clippings, shredded paper, crushed egg shells and anything from the kitchen I give the chooks. They turn it into some of the best fertilizer on earth – “Vermicompost”. It requires very little work, perhaps five minutes a week. A well-balanced factory produces no offensive odours.
You can start a worm factory almost anywhere without any fancy bins. In fact, I encouraged some of my staff twenty years ago who were caring for intellectually disabled children under ten years of age, to start them. The staff took the children down the street to the local greengrocer, and he gave them twenty or thirty polystyrene boxes that had held fruit, plus a few lettuce and cabbage leaves.
They purchased a kilo of worms (the only financial outlay in this venture), placed the boxes under a shady tree in the backyard, named one after each child and away the worms went eating to their hearts’ delight. A piece of carpet or hessian bag covered the bottom of the box, a couple of handfuls of earth went in, some shredded newspaper, a small handful of worms, some food and a light sprinkle of water and another piece of old carpet over the top to keep it all damp and protected from birds. Every time the children walked down the street the greengrocer gave some more boxes and leaves.
The next time I called into this care centre to greet the children and to check with the staff, they had about sixty boxes stacked up, each one cared for by a child with Down syndrome or some such disability. Tens of thousands of worms eating daily; plastic bags of castings by the front gate selling to passers by at $5 a bag for home gardens, old milk cartons full of worm wee for $2 and a polystyrene box kit already set up for $20 each with a fisherman’s bait bag of worms for $10. Those intellectually disabled children thrilled to the daily routine of feeding, or bagging up worms or compost, and it gave my staff a fresh interest in alternative therapy with the children while at the same time raising significant funds.
As you can see only a few things are needed to make a good worm factory: some compost, a bin, bedding, worms and worm food. By following the steps listed below, you will learn to make, maintain and use your own worm compost.
Your bin can be any size up to 40 centimetres deep, bigger than that can be too heavy to shift. Remember compost worms are surface feeders. I would suggest you cover the earth and food completely with a bit of old carpet cut neatly to size. That stops it from drying out on a hot day, and stops small flies. Use a bag or another piece of old carpet to cover the holes in the bottom while allowing for drainage, but keeping your worms from wandering. Place the factory in a shady location e.g. in the garage, under the house, in a basement, or laundry. Mine is out of the sun alongside a shed wall.
The bedding material can be torn up newspaper with a couple of handfuls of compost, manure from horse or cow, good earth dampened with a little sprinkle of water. A few well-crushed eggshells or dolomite every few months are good for providing grit and calcium. Add the worms and a little vegetable matter.
The best kinds of worms for composting are “red worms” or “red wrigglers.” They are different from the earthworms you would normally find in the ground. These worms have a big appetite, reproduce quickly and thrive in confinement. They can eat more than their own weight in food every day! You can purchase a kilo at hardware stores for about $15.
Compost worms like to eat the same things we eat, as well as vegetable tops and leaves, stale bread, apple cores, coffee grounds and non-greasy leftovers. They don’t like too much citrus peel such as from oranges, and it is best not to give them meat scraps as that attracts the flies.
Three problems. First, the worms may die – which means you probably have the factory in the direct sun. Or maybe you have fed them horse or cow manure from animals that have been drenched to kill their internal worms. Or it is too wet – that is your fault! Cut the watering. Small fruit flies around about. Fit a lid, or bury the food under some castings.
You harvest the castings every few months, by putting the food up one end of the factory only. The worms will all go to that, and you can shovel the other half of the castings out without any worms. Then repeat using the other end. Sit the box over a bucket and the wee will drain into it.
My wife dilutes it by pouring some into a watering can and adding five times the amount of water. Sprinkle over all your plants. The compost can just be sprinkled by hand over the roots of your plants or else made into a slurry with water in a bucket and poured over roots. The next rain will take the nutrients down to the roots.
Change all of your compost every six months or so to keep your worms healthy. Worm compost is more concentrated than most other composts because worms are excellent at digesting food wastes and breaking them down into simple plant nutrients. Use it sparingly for best results.
Vermicompost is similar to other composts, except that it uses worms in addition to microbes and bacteria to turn organic waste into a nutrient-rich fertilizer.
Too difficult? Remember a care centre for intellectually disabled children can do it with some help from the green grocer and a couple of young carers! Have fun, but don’t try to give each pet worm a name! These are the best kind of worms to have!
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC
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