The worms do a fantastic job of recycling our waste materials from the market garden.
Improve the efficiency of your compost heap by adding a kilogram of dendrobaeana worms - they eat their own weight of waste material each day and will continue to increase in numbers. We feed almost everything to our worms, citrus fruits do, however, need a few weeks to allow the acidity to go out of the fruit, and meat is to be avoided so that rats are not encouraged into the heap, we do put in the odd egg box and toilet roll inner - and even the trimmings when we have our hair cut.
If you want to start your own wormery, revitalise an existing wormery or want to improve the efficiency of your compost heap it is easy.
So what do you need? Well a compost bin or some sort which is free draining, but has got a lid or covering. We have some of the council bins from recylcenow which work very well and also have large composting bins which are just wooden boxes covered with bubble wrap and a dark covering held down with tyres which also do a good job, some newspaper, and some composting worms.
We started them off by putting in a couple of newspapers shredded and watered with a watering can, 1kg or worms with their existing bedding (which is some of the compost that they had been making in another bin), a little kitchen waste and another shredded newspaper. We let them settle in and then just started adding the kitchen waste each week from the kitchen bin we also got from the council (previous to that we used an old wallpaper pasting bucket from DIY).
If you have an existing compost then you can just lift a little of the uncomposted matter from the top and place a little shredded paper in the middle (make a sort of nest) tip 1kg compost worms on top and then cover with the uncomposted matter again and let them get on with it.
If the compost bins get too wet we add a little dry shredded paper and if they get a little dry we add a little water, usually from rinsing out the kitchen bin.
Generally we have let the worms just get on with it. You may find a few trying to escape around the top when you lift the lid, we just scoop them up and pop them back in and you can get a bit of a problem with small flies if you add too much fruit waste without chopping it up a bit to help it break down so the worms can do their thing.
We have so far not filled one bin in a season, but have managed to get a good wheelbarrow full of compost from the bottom of the bin for seedlings. When it is time to get the compost out of the bin (we did this last year in March) we have lifted the bin off, picked off the uncomposted food using a fork and dumping it in a pile nearby, then picked off the layer (about a 6 inch layer of composted waste) which contains most of the worms (agin using a fork) and put this in a bucket, and then collected the remaining composted material into the wheelbarrow. There are still a few worms in the compost and a good number of eggs; we just picked out the larger of the worms and put them with the others. We then put the compost bin into a slightly new location, put some shredded newspaper at the bottom, watered it and added the worms and uncomposted material and heyho off we go again.
Posts
