![]() You can place your worm tower anywhere in your garden bed - whether it be in the centre, or in the corner. This should be somewhere in your garden amongst your plants, so that the worm castings can help feed the immediate garden beds. There are some that claim to compost within 1-2 weeks, but these often incorporate hot bins, or in-ground technologies to speed up the process.To set up a worm tower, all you need is a worm tower, a location, some worm bedding & worms!įirst, find a suitable location for your worm tower. Most worm farms produce worm castings and compost after around 2 months, but others can take up to 4 months to completely process your kitchen waste into usable compost for the garden. In worm farms, this nutrient rich material is perfect for fertilising gardens. They are produced by worms as they churn up the earth, and usually deposited on the soil surface when they process surface lying leaves. ![]() Worm castings are the small curls of earth you see on your soil, or on sand on the beach. I like to keep a mixture of both, but the convenience of a worm farm can’t be beaten. There are arguments in favour of both, but worm farms work faster, and produce more moisture-retentive compost than traditional compost bins. Is a worm farm better than a compost bin? ![]() Most worm farms are sold as tower systems, so as you build layers of food waste, you use the oldest layer as compost. Worms eat, digest and excrete kitchen scraps, newspaper and cardboard to produce near perfect garden compost in the form of worm castings. (Check our guide on the Best Types of Mulch for the Garden | When and How to Use it. It’s completely ok to take worms out of the worm bag and spread them around the garden as they are great at improving the soil elsewhere, and help to mix the new compost down into the soil, so all you need to do is mulch. This compost has loads of worms in it, and if you get rid of it all, your worms will be spread all over the garden with no way of getting back into the worm tower. You should never completely clean out a worm farm if you intend to keep using it, instead, harvest the compost you need, but leave a quarter of the compost in place. By storing your food scraps in a scrap bin in the kitchen, you can just tip that into the worm farm once a week, then add newspaper over the top.īy adding paper, you create a barrier against flies that might be attracted to the rotting food, and it helps to keep smells down which reduces any chance of vermin (but vermin are unlikely as long as you stick to vegetable scraps and don’t include any fatty or cooked foods). There’s no problem with feeding it every day, but your worms aren’t likely to be able to keep up with it. You should feed your worm farm every week. Dry leaves are great in autumn too, and if you have any dry grass clippings or dry garden waste lying around it’s better for the soil than newspaper. Adding dry materials to help retain the moisture from rotting veg is a really cheap way to manage moisture in your worm farms.įor every handful of kitchen scraps, add another handful of shredded newspaper or cardboard to pile. While it might seem sensible to add just kitchen waste to your worm farm, it needs some moisture management. They do a great job of tunnelling and oxygenating the soil. Worms need some moisture to survive, but too little leads to oxygen starvation in the middle of your worm farm. Equally, if it’s too dry, try to block up some of the drainage, or stop using the tap quite as often. If you reach into your worm farm and your hand comes out muddy, you need to start regulating the moisture as it should be moist, but not wet. The best stuff to put in is banana skins, crushed egg shells, cabbage leaves, old tomatoes and potato peel. Obviously, the exact nutrient levels coming out of your worm farm depend on what you put in, but from an average kitchen is usually a pretty perfect NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium) mix for the vegetable garden. While you can buy worm castings, Bunnings do a great range, you can easily create mountains of your own black gold with your own worm farm, and fertilise your entire garden with it.īy churning through your veggies, the worms promote decomposition and as the liquid waste is useless to the worms, goodness, it creates an amazing liquid fertiliser to sue on tomatoes, and squashes. Worm castings are the little swirls of mud you see on your lawns, and on beaches, and are basically just worm poop.Īs the worms dig through your food waste, they eat it, and churn it up into almost perfect compost, with balanced nutrients and better water retention than traditional compost. First, let’s talk about worm castings, or vermicompost.
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