The Wormery

Built to a vision, it was once just a dream of ours to have a Worm Farm that transforms waste into rich soil!

We feed our worms with raw veg waste from the kitchen, which the worms consume and their castings are supposedly the most nutritional fertiliser known to man. The liquid run off is also collected in a bucket underneath and used as a liquid fertiliser!

The worms are given rotting vegetable scraps which are covered with surrounding soil (to avoid fruit flies) and covered with damp cardboard.

In just a couple weeks the worms consume kilos of waste into Black Gold!

Harvesting and using worm castings

When you put your bare hand through that soil and find no chunks or gooeyness, consider it ready to use in the garden! It will be compact and almost black, full of rich nutrients perfect for use in vegetable gardens, flower beds and especially potted plants that are lacking nutrients.

It can be used in various ways such as adding it to holes before planting, or sprinkling a layer around plant bases.

In our system, we stop feeding a section of the wormery and naturally the worms will leave this section once the food is all eaten, and leave us with free access to the castings after around a week.

Just checking in

Underneath the damp cardboard is where all the baby worms seem to be gathered.

We check in on our red wrigglers a couple times a week especially during bad weather, and to check they have food. We give them recycled coffee grounds for a treat!

During the winter worm numbers drop but we can see below lots of new babies appear in Spring and the population will rise again.

Castings can be ordered online but we don’t see it available anywhere locally. Much better to grow your own, and get rid of some food scraps at the same time!

Design and Build

We built the Wormery to have several sections which can be closed off independently

We kick started the worm population by grabbing a few handfuls worth of worms fresh from the compost heap, and occasional extra handfuls throughout the summer. The worms have gone on to be very productive and reproduced quickly to create a huge amount of workers! Since they can eat their body weight in food in a day, we’re able to get rid of scraps from the kitchen and the garden and know the wormies will transform it for us.

The depth of each segment is around the same depth of the local ground here on the land. We have around a foot of soil that lays on pure chalk here in the south of England which brings its own challenges.

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