Soil Building Part 3 – Worm Farm

This is the third, and last of my three major soil building factories – the worm farm.

The hardest part was getting the cast iron bathtub. It was on Gumtree as a giveaway, come and get it, bring a trailer. Beauty. What they didn’t say was that it down over the edge of the drive on a slippery muddy slope at the top of a very steep driveway with no turnaround. I don’t know if you’ve ever moved a cast iron bathtub? Uphill, on a slippery slope?

Once we had the tub, the rest was easy.

We set it up on the shady, south side of our house, with easy access from the lane. It is up on a frame built from recycled hardwood pallets, just to make a space under the plughole for a bucket to collect the leachate, or worm pee (and to make it a bit more visually appealing, something we try to make more of a priority in suburbia.) The plughole has a shadeloth filter over it to let leachate filter out but keep the worms and castings in.

The bath has a covering of recycled corflutes (ok, not so visually appealing – one day we’ll get around to replacing them) to keep flooding rain out. The original bedding was just compost from the chook pen, mixed with some torn up and shredded cardboard. And then we just tipped in a couple of thousand worms.

Our original worm farm was one of those conventional tiered plastic boxes kind, and it provided the starter population for the bathtub, but the population has increased phenomenally in the tub. They seem to like it there. We occasionally feed them a bucket of kitchen scraps, but only when the chooks are overfed – most times kitchen scraps are more valuable as chook food. The worms get everything in the bucket – onion skins, citrus peels, fish skeletons, coffee grounds. So long as it is not too much at once, there seems to be no kind of organic matter they reject entirely. The one kitchen waste they have exclusive rights to is egg shells. We have a dedicated blender (sourced from an op shop) for egg shells. When it’s full, we add some greens and water to make a green egg shell smoothie for the worms.

We’ve also discovered that the worms **loooove** partially fermented seaweed from the barrels, which is lucky because seaweed is an abundant resource here.

The leachate collected in the bucket under the plughole is a rich, liquid fertiliser. We use it diluted as a special treat for plants that are stuggling, doing a growth spurt, fruiting or flowering heavily, or confined to a pot or hanging basket.

The other product is worm castings. They are collected just by feeding the worms at one end of the tub for a week so the worms all migrate up that end and the castings can be dug out without too many of them. Worm castings are thick and mud-like, and don’t drain well. Mixed with something with good drainage properties though, they make a wonderful pick-me-up and plant immune system booster, ideal for heading off aphid or powdery mildew attacks.

Look at them. Aren’t they lovely?