How To Make an Organic wormery

Using Your Worm Casts
Worm casts (your finished worm compost) are the creme de la creme of composts. As such, they are best used sparingly - by the handful rather than by the wheelbarrow full. More than a compost, treat the worm casts as a fertilizer. Give a top dressing to all your hanging baskets, pot plants etc...a little goes a long way. Water plants well first and then apply a handful of worm casts - do this with all your garden plants.

The Liquid Fertilizer
The liquid that is drained from the wormery is a marvellous liquid feed for all your plants but especially fruit. Dilute with approximately ten parts water before using as a foliar feed or watering plants.

How to Make an Organic Wormery

Harvesting - collecting the worm compost.

Obviously your wormery will take time to fill up with worm casts. Once they start to fill, remove the freshest material first along with the layer immediately underneath which contains most of the worms. Keep this separate as this can all go back once you have harvested the rich, dark material at the bottom, the worm casts.

If you are using a stacking system e.g. "Can-O-Worms" simply remove and empty the bottom container then place back on top of the wormery. The whole cycle then starts again.

Next -  how to use the worm compost.

How to Make an Organic Wormery.

What can you put in your wormery?

Small amounts of "difficult" kitchen scraps are ideal - such as food waste, kitchen left-overs, meat, fish, cheese rinds and bread. Small amounts of raw fresh fruit, veg trimmings and garden waste are also acceptable.

It's best to separate most of your fresh vegetables and garden waste to use in your ordinary compost heap. Too much of these will create masses of liquid.

How to harvest the worm compost - next blog. See you later, Sandkat.

Make Your Own Wormery.

When you are starting from scratch, you need to make sure your container will provide a suitable living environment for your worms. Many large containers such as dustbins and barrels can be adapted to become wormeries.
No matter what container you use, you must start off with a good layer of bedding. This could be leaf-mould, finished compost, well-rotted sawdust, newspaper/cardboard, any or all of these. Make sure your mix is thoroughly wetted as the worms will die if allowed to dry out.
Once you have the accomodation sorted, you need the worms! The worms in your garden are not suitable for the wormery - you need compost worms, lots of them. To really get going you need to buy at least 500 but preferably 1,000 worms, ideally Tiger worms or Dendras which live naturally in compost and manure heaps.

How To Create a Wormery

Worm composting is a brilliant natural way of re-cycling all your kitchen scraps. Worms are particularly useful to the gardener as they will eat rotting matter. They will also eat your food waste, paper and cardboard. Their "worm casts" (manure) is extremely good for all soil types and plants, used as a fertiliser rather than a bulky soil improver. Wormeries produce a valuable liquid fertiliser which should be regularly drained off the prevent the worms from drowning. this can be diluted with water (10 parts water to 1 part liquid) and used as a feed for flowers and vegetables. Worms should be kept cool and moist. Don't keep the temperature too cold though as worms are not very active at low temperatures. However, too hot they will try to climb out, too wet they may drown or migrate.

Next update we will discuss making your own wormery.

Sandkat xx