Wormery | Getting Started With a Wormery

Getting Started With a Wormery

Filed Under Wormery | Comments Off

An Overview of Building Your Own Wormery

Composting with a wormery is an excellent way to recycle the organic waste products of your home and be able to reuse them as an excellent quality natural fertilizer.  By recycling your household organic wastes this way, you will be cutting down on the volume of garbage that makes it to your local landfill.  The main advantage to composting with a wormery rather than a compost bin is that you can place your wormery either indoors or outdoors.

Supplies that You Will Need to Get Started

A wormery basically consists of a container, bedding, grit for digestion, worms, and kitchen waste for food.  It really is that simple.

When constructing a wormery, both plastic and wood type of containers will work very well.  Which material you choose depends on what you have available to you as well as where you are going to house the wormery.  For indoor placement, plastic is probably better.  For overall worm health, wood is a better container as it creates a better environment for the worms by absorbing extra liquids and providing better insulation.

The best way to gauge the size of the container you will need is to start keeping track of how many pounds of food waste that you will add to the wormery on average each week.  The container should be able to provide a depth of about one foot.  A little shallower is okay.  Then for each pound of food trash that you will add to the wormery each week you will need one square foot of surface area.  So for a house that has a small amount, say four pounds of food waste a week, you would need a container one foot deep by 2 feet wide by 2 feet long (or any combination that results in four square feet of surface area).  The container will also need a cover – indoors you can use a dark drop sheet, plastic, or burlap; but outdoors you will want something more sturdy.  The wormery will also need to have proper ventilation so that your worms will be able to breathe.

You will need to provide sufficient moist bedding to the bin.  There are many different types of bedding materials that will work including old shredded up newspaper, leaves, straw, dead plant material, sawdust, etc.  Worms will prefer a variety of bedding materials whenever possible and it will be necessary to add grit in the form of sand or soil.  The worms will need this to be able to digest their food.  The bedding is there to provide some nutrients for the worms as well as some moisture and spaces to bury food waste in.  The bedding should be moistened before adding to your container.  Don’t fill the container to the top; about three quarters of the way should be sufficient.

Worms for Your Wormery

The best worms to use for your wormery are either Eisenia foetida (redworms) or Lumbricus rubellus.  If you can’t obtain either of these locally from garden supply stores, you may need to order them on the internet.  The amount of worms that you will need to get started will depend on the amount of food waste you want to compost each day.  Generally speaking you will need two pounds of worms for every one pound of food per day.  Stay away from feeding your worms any dairy, grain, meat, or especially oily foods as these can cause significant problems with smells which will attract insects and rodents to your worm bin.  Burying the food waste appropriately in different spots of the wormery each day will also help avoid these issues.

Maintaining Your Wormery

So long as your wormery remains in proper balance, there really isn’t much you need to do to take care of it.  After about two and a half months you will have finished compost at which point you will need to separate out the worms from your finished product.  The easiest way to do this is to move the compost to one side and add new bedding and food to the other.  The worms will relocate to the side with the food and then you can remove your compost for use in the garden.

Comments

Comments are closed.