Permaculture Living

Another customer question from my time working in the nursery.

Question: The top layer of my worm farm is full of food scraps and won’t fit any more in. What do I do now?

Answer: The short answer is that you need to wait until the worms have eaten all the existing food scraps before you can add more.

The longer answer: you can also increase the rate at which the worms eat your scraps. The slower way is to increase the number of worms. They will breed and grow more numerous the longer you have the farm - they might only eat a small amount when it’s brand new, but as the population grows they will eat more and more.

The second way is to blend the scraps in a food processor or blender before you put them in the farm. The worms are tiny and seem to prefer slightly rotted food, so if you blend it into into a vegie smoothie it breaks down faster and they eat it much faster than if you were to throw in entire potato peelings or fruit rinds.

The worm farm has been operational for a couple of months, and the worms are busily breeding - and eating more and more - inside. I’ve found that they prefer softer food scraps like tomatoes or strawberries, and large scraps like potato peelings take a long time to be eaten (and the skin is still left at the end).

Smaller is also better. Blending all the different food scraps into a vegetable smoothie works well, but makes quite a wet mix. The best worm food so far is fruit and vegetable pulp from a juicer; it’s in tiny pieces and not as wet as the blended scraps.

I’ve just set up a worm farm to produce castings and liquid fertiliser to feed my container plants.

Regular composting has worked pretty well for me but requires a lawn to provide the carbon elements; the worm farm produces pure liquid and solid fertiliser, and can used in much more limited space.

I bought the Can-O-Worms direct from the nursery at Northey Street City Farm for $80, and ordered the worms from Kookaburra Farms. The worms turned up in a box in the post, not seeming to mind being shipped around halfway around Queensland.

Below is the Can-O-Worms in its packaging. It comes with three worm layers, a base to hold the liquid fertiliser, a lid, a tap and nut, five legs for the base, a manual, and compressed package of coir fibre.

And the cotton bag full of worms.

Inside, a mix of compost and 1000 compost worms.

Step one of the process was to put the brick of coir fibre (complete with paper packaging) into a bucket of water and let it soak while putting together the rest of the farm.

Step two was to add the attachments to the bottom layer of the farm: screwing the tap to the hole and fastening it with the nut provided, and sliding in the five plastic legs. The bottom layer isn’t for worms, but is where the liquid fertiliser collects (hence the tap).

Step three was to add the first of the worm trays to the base - and to wait for the coir fibre to soak up the water. When the coir was broken up and fully soaked, it looked like this:

Next the coir was spread over the first worm tray.

Then the worms and their compost were added on top of the coir fibre.

Together the coir and worms reached the top of the ribs on the inside of the tray, which meant I could go right ahead and add the second worm tray (the worms like to feed from the top, so will move on up into the next tray when the lower one is full).

I sprinkled a small handful of food scraps on the bottom of the second tray and covered it all with the cotton bag (wet) the worms came in, to keep them in the damp and dark as they like it.

I put the lid on, and (later) moved the farm out of the sun into a shadier part of the balcony. I stashed the third worm housing layer to be used as the farm fills up further.

Two days later, the worms have been busy turning the food scraps into worm castings.

I’ve been looking into getting a worm farm so I can produce liquid fertiliser to feed my container plants.

I’ve since discovered that the Queensland Government is providing a rebate of 50% or up to $50 for the purchase of the farm (though not the worms). So if you’ve been procrastinating on buying one, like me, you have until December to pull your finger out and get one for half price.