My Early Birthday Wormery!

It is my birthday pretty soon, so I decided to take advantage of that fact and asked Ed if he could get me a wormery. After doing a bit of research I found a UK based company and decided that the The Midi Wormery was the one for us, this was because the website said that it was the ideal size for the output of 2 people's kitchen waste. Wormery.co.uk will also plant 1 tree for every wormery sold! 

We had a little worm drama today as Ed said it had been dispatched on Tuesday and the delivery company hadn't found the address and had sent it back to the depot. So we were worried about our little worms future, but thankfully Ed managed to sort it out and we were able to bring these little guys home.

I decided I wanted a wormery because I was fed up of throwing all of our veg trimmings in the bin, I grew up in the country where we had a compost heap and all that kind of waste would just get thrown on that. Apparently a third of a household's waste is likely to be made up of kitchen generated organic matter and if we just throw it in the bin it means that it ends up on landfill. I think that is a waste when I can be generating lovely compost and potent liquid fertiliser to help me grow some tasty produce in our allotment next year. 

This wormery is designed so it is ventilated for the worms to be happy and so it doesn't let any of the kitchen waste smell out, pretty clever huh? This means that you can keep these worm paradises indoor or outdoors (mine is going to live under the kitchen sink).

This is Ed screwing the tap on, hopefully in 10 weeks we can start syphoning worm juice off. Worm juice is a brilliant liquid fertiliser that you can dilute with 10 parts water and use on any plants that you want to grow up big and strong. I can't wait to start using this on the allotment next year. 

Once the tap has been fitted you place the worm platform on a little piece of polystyrene, then you lay a sheet of newspaper over the platform and pour the compost onto it to make a lovely welcoming home for the tiger worms. The bag of lime is included in the kit because every month a handful needs to be added to keep the pH nice and neutral. Also if you are putting a lot of onion or garlic in it is good to add some lime just so the worms don't slow down their dining. 

Then the worms go in! 

Newspaper can also be added if the worm environment gets a little too wet, it is best not to add newspaper all the time because the worms just can't digest all that topical entertainment.

Once the worms have gone in on top of the compost it is time to put 2-3 handfuls of kitchen waste in. Then you put it in the daylight for 10 minutes to encourage the worms to burrow into the compost. Then it is time to put the lid on, the worms won't need to be fed for a week, then the next 2 weeks they get 2-3 handfuls of kitchen waste each week. After that they should be able to much through all the kitchen waste that we can give them. They dine on nearly anything from the kitchen you can think of including tea bags, scraps and egg shells etc. I can't wait until the wormery is up and running smoothly.