Homely CapersCompost Worms
Much has been said about the life of the humble worm and it’s benefits to our gardens and environment. There is plenty of short ‘comments’ on the internet about worm farming and compost worms, and there are plenty of long winded books that go into the full biology of worms. I’m here to write a no nonsense outline on successfully creating an environment that is suited to the growth and breeding of composting worms.
Over the past 4 years I have bought and bred up a full colony of composting worms in my three tier Reln Worm Factory. I have had a couple of failures, mostly due to over heating and over feeding but it can be easily avoided.
Starting out:
Firstly you will need to get hold of a worm farm, there are a number of commercial units available, but if you are really keen you can build your own. I’m not going to go into details on how to build one, but here are a good link to get you started.
A lot of people use Polystyrene boxes, they are manufactured from pertrochemical products that will release toxins into your worm castings by means of chemical breakdown and oxidation. If you want your worm farm to be organic, dont use them.
Using a Reln Worm Factory or Can Of Worms you can be up and running within a short period of time.
Tip: If you live in Queensland (Australia) the State Government will give you a $50 rebate on your worm farm and worms as part of it’s environmental policy.
Inside your worm farm you will find a coir block and some instructions. The basic outline of the instructions is to wet the coir and place in one of the baskets supplied. Make sure you squeeze out a fair bit of the water, as the new worms don’t like it being too wet.
The next step is to source some worms, they can be purchased from garden centres or online from a retailer such as Worms Down Under, 1000 worms should be plenty to start your farm, they are about $40 for 1000. They can ship them via registered post in a box with wet newspaper all wrapped up in a calico bag. My worms took 4 days to arrive, even after that period they were as lively as ever!
Introducing the worms:
Tip the worms and soil they arrived in on top of the moist coir. Leave the lid off the worm farm, the light will cause them to move down into their new home.
Take a newspaper and soak it in water making sure that all the pages are soaked. Unfold it in the centre and lay it over the top of the soil in the worm farm. This will keep the worms cool and moist. Coir can be slightly acidic, so a couple of teaspoons of garden lime through the coir will help bring it back to neutral.
Food:
You can feed the worms food scraps such as fruit and vegetable peels, pulverized egg shells, tea bags and coffee grounds. It is advisable not to compost meats, dairy products, oily foods, and grains because of problems with smells, flies, and rodents.
Onion skins and citrus are not very good for worms as they don’t like them much.
Worms don’t have teeth, so the smaller you can make the food the better. A blender is always a good way to make food smaller, otherwise you can freeze the scraps for a day or two which when they defrost will be softer for the worms to eat.
Location:
Worms like a temperature range of 12 to 29 degrees celcius, so the prime location will vary from area to area. Typically a shady spot without full sun will do them best. In warmer areas you can cover them with a white towel or sheet to prevent excessive heat absorbtion.
Breeding:
In optimum conditions compost worms breed and lay an egg capsule every 7 to 10 days. Each egg contains on 6 to 20 worms, hatching in 21 days and reaching maturity in 3 months. Best breeding occurs in autumn, late winter and spring. To grow your worm population you need to give them a damp, cool and dark environment avoiding bright light and noise.
Worm Wee:
As 70-80% of what gets put into the worm farm is water, one of the biggest by products of your worm farm will be water. This gets caught in the bottom tray and can be used as a fertiliser for your garden. The ‘worm wee’ is a combination of water and nutrients from the break down of the material, simply dilute it 4 parts water to 1 part worm wee and pour it on your plants.
Harvesting Castings:
When the lower tray is converted to castings and reaches high enough for the next tray to touch the castings then it is time to add the next tray. Scrape an inch of compost from the top and place into the next tray making sure that the top of the bedding in the lower tray comes in complete contact with the bottom of the tray you are adding. Add some food to the top tray then cover with 10 cm of wetted (moist) shredded paper.
Leave this for a week, a lot of the worms (being hungry) will move from the bottom tray to the top tray to get food.After a week, put the second tray on the bottom, place the tray full of castings on the top with the lid off. As worms don’t like light, any worms left in the mix will move down. After 20 minutes, skim a layer of 3cm off the castings and set aside, leave for another 20 minutes. Repeat this process till there are no castings left and the worms have been forced down.
Odours:
Bad odor is usually due to overabundance of “greens” (wet waste) in the bin, results from too much nitrogen combining with hydrogen to form ammonia. To neutralize the odors, add a fair amount of shredded newspaper or other “browns” to the mix to absorb excess moisture, remove the smelly waste, and stop adding food to the bin until a substantial portion of the uneaten food has been turned into compost. The carbon will absorb the nitrogen and form a compound that is not smelly.
Pests:
Having a worm farm that is up and out of the way of pests is the easiest method to prevent them. Ants can pose a problem, but can be easily fixed by putting the legs in trays of water will stop them in their tracks. Maggots grow really well in worm farms, one fly can lay 500 eggs so make sure you keep the lid on your bin!
This short video goes through the process of freezing your scraps. I’m not sure what the plastic bags in the worm farm do though, worms dont eat plastic!
There it all is, should you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask!
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15 Responses to “Compost Worms”
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About Me
My name is Ben, and I'm a self confessed gardenoholic. My other interests include growing plants, looking at plants, drinking coffee and taking the odd photo. My wife thinks I'm mad, but is getting into the whole garden thing, possibly going mad as well. In my spare time I'm a geologist (must be something about dirt and rocks...)- Get me on Twitter
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I would like to know whether the Red Earthworms could be used for pharmaceutical and medicinal purposes. It is said the worms’ enzymes are suitable for that purpose. If it is true, could you please provide me the research materials on such claims.
Thanks.
My worms crawl out of my Bins. My bins are 30 gallon tree pots. There is 7″ to 10″ to crawl up and a lid that does not fit tightly. I have screen in the bottom. Any suggestions.
Thanks,
Tom
Tom, cover your pots with wet sacking. The worms will be kept in the pots The worms will consume the sacking over time, but it isw easily replaced.
Shahriman
RED EARTHWORMS are high in protein, other than that fact they have not been accorded any medicinal miracles that I am aware of. Of course you could use them as bait to catch quality fish whgch are rich in essential oils that are good for the health.
For setting up a commercial worm farm
1 x 400Kg potato or apple crate
3 bales of peas Straw
2 25kg bags of organic soil
100 shredded newspapers ( to shred =feed into a garden chipper)
Drill a hole in one of the planks near thye bottom of the bin and fit a tap to drain excess liquid. Line the bin base with black tough plastic, ensuring the tap outlet is above the plastic liner
Use Sacking on top of the bin to keep the contents damp and the worms in the box
KEEP THE BINS UNDER SHADE
Dampen daily in hot conditions with your shower unit
Connect a hose permanently to a garden tap and suspend it like a shower above the box. This is so that you can keep the material damp.
Prepare the box in the same manner as the RELN farm as the article on this page. Add to your box 4000 worms (about 1 KG)
This should produce you about 80,000 worms in about 6 months if you follow the rules of not feeding onion skins or citrus skins to the mix. Use spoiled vegetable matter. Avoid adding grass clippings as these generate heat and will kill your worms.
You can even collect green waste from your greengrocer to help feed your worm farm.
Prepare 3 xtra units after the first 6 months of production, Tip the contents of bin 1 out onto a large wet plastic sheet. Gradually reduce the heap of castings, forcing the worms to go to the bottom of ther pile when most of the castings have been removed and bagged, divide the remaining worms and add them to the newly prepared boxes. You should now have about 40,000 to each box. You can sell off the excess castings now in 2 -5Kg bags. You can keep cycling or adding bins to your farm as you want to expand your project
any questions? [email protected]
Hello, I have a worm bin that has recently been giving off a smell, but the smell is not an ammonia-like smell at all. In fact, it is almost sweet. Do you have any suggestions about what the cause might be?
I notice that you use a mix of 4:1 for your worm pee or leachate while others recommend 10:1 dilution. What plants do you use the higher concentration on?
Interesting to hear how you use coir in the process.
More information on coir can be obtained from http://coirgreen.blogspot.com/
For the post “I have a worm bin that has recently been giving off a smell, but the smell is not an ammonia-like smell at all. In fact, it is almost sweet. Do you have any suggestions about what the cause might be?”: Worm bins should smell pleasant. This smell could be a too acid bedding, which will kill your worms. Avoid over-feeding and add crushed egg shells regularly to keep a neutral ph. If it’s very acid, you can also add calcium carbinate, but you need to toss the bed to release the carbon dioxide that can result. Check your bed with a ph meter. Acid conditions are deadly to worms, or will make them crawl.
The nice thing about worm composting is the fact that a worm can eat its weight in waste in only 24 hours. So you will get finished compost quicker with worms than you will with the traditional method. Some people add worms to their tradition piles when it is almost completely composted to finish it up faster.
You need to make sure the worms have plenty to snack on. Make sure you put a variety of green and brown waste in the trays. Green waste is things like produce waste, grass clippings, etc. For the brown waste the perfect choice is newspapers, but not the glossy sections. Tear or shred the newspaper before adding it to the tray. You will want to add more green waste than brown. The brown waste adds carbon to the mix. That is why newspapers are a perfect choice.
The compost made by the worms is in the form of worm castings or worm manure. That is right. The worms eat the green and brown material and leave the digested results behind for you to mix into your garden soil. This is very beneficial for your garden and not as smelly as regular manure!
Using worms to create compost is a great, odor free way to create healthy organic material for your yard. You will be recycling your green waste and giving your garden a boost at the same time!
Bedding
some of my worms seem to be going down into the bottom section of my worm farm where the liquid is collected and drowning themselves. Why is that and what can i do to stop them doing that?
Hi Andrew. There are side effects to any manufactured earthwormfarm Worms can survive in water for about 24 hours, however here is a good tip for you…. 1. If your worm has a drain tap then remove it. 2. Drill a hole in the base of your bottom tray and use the base as your first component of worm bedding. Just angle the worm farm slightly to allow a continuos drain of precious vermicast/worm tea (Use this as a foliar spray diluted).
Yes there will be a small amont of liquid at the very base of the vermicast however it is continualy draining. The best bit is you GAIN another tray of vermicast and your worms survive!
I’ve just been given a ‘can-of-warms’, thanks for the hints.
I have had my worm bin active for a little over a month now, but I notice a real problem with fruit flies. I had one person tell me to use an empty try and put shredded paper in it to “confuse” the fruit flies and trap them to stop their breeding, but this has had no effect. They also suggested I microwave any “food” I add for thirty seconds before adding to bin. Does anyone have any other suggestions for this problem? My husband is ready to make me get rid of it if I don’t find a solution quickly.
Thanks a lot for your detailed article on worm composting. It’s been something that I’ve wanted to do for ages for my little garden veg patch. I’m thinking of putting it behind my hut where it doesn’t get much sun.