A plastic bin modified for earthworm farming. Photo/Courtesy
What you need to know:
The compost from earthworms helps in ensuring that the soil is fertile.
Earthworms in your garden soil demonstrate good fertility as they help with aeration and water penetration. They hasten the breakdown of organic waste and add nutrients with their rich worm castings.
They reduce the need for the use of artificial inorganic fertilizers so that the garden can be run completely on organic systems. By adding lots of organic matter to your garden helps to increase the worm populations providing they already exist. If they do not exist it shows the soil is extremely lacking in fertility.
To correct the balance worms can be purchased by the kilo and added to the soil with lots of organic matter.
For serious gardeners having a small containerised earthworm farm offers considerable benefits, because the end product is vermicompost and vermiliquid (worm tea) that is rich in all the nutrients that are required in your garden for growing your plants and vegetables.
The containers for an earthworm farm can be anything from an old 200 litre metal or plastic drums to broken sinks, baths and tanks, recycle what you have at home. Even an old car or lorry tire can be used with the rims cut off and placed on a stand so that a bucket can be placed below to catch the worm tea.
Whatever the container place it in a cool shady part of the garden and see that it is covered to prevent rain from entering. Worms need to breathe so make sure there is ventilation.
Ideally a false floor needs to be fitted into the drum or tank by using timber staging covered with hessian or plastic mesh sacking so that it is some 5 to 10 cm above the base, onto which will be placed the ‘bedding’ (5 to 10 cm of old leaves, grass clippings, straw or similar organic material) and then the worms.
The bedding should be moist but not wet. For a 200 litre drum you will need about 500 grams of worms. By raising the bedding and the worms above the floor of the container it allows the worm tea to run from the container into a collecting bucket.
After loading the worms the final step is to add some 20 to 30 cm of chopped up vegetable waste which can also be mixed with well rotted animal manure.
Kitchen waste is ideal for feeding earthworms comprising potato and carrot peelings, cabbage and lettuce leaves and any other kitchen vegetable matter but NOT citrus peel, meat, bones, dairy products, fats and oils, spices or animal faeces. Earthworms particularly love tea leaves and tea bags, bread, rice and pasta, crushed eggshell, cardboard or any partially rotted compost.
Animal manure (cow, horse, sheep, goat or chicken) can be added but it must be well rotted. If your conditions are right you will be amazed by how much the earthworms can eat.
Check from time to time that the climate in the container is moist – not oozing wet, that it never gets too hot (ideally 24 to 25 degrees C) and that it doesn’t smell, which is a bad sign that something is not right.
Depending on your set up the worm tea is either trickling into a bucket or plastic container, or through a tap on an outlet pipe, which will need opening on a weekly basis to bleed off the tea. This worm tea is extremely valuable in the garden, particularly for the vegetables as it is so full of nutrients.
It can either be used as a spray to foliar feed your plants, when it should be mixed with water at the rate of half a litre of worm tea to five litres of water, or it can be applied directly to the plants at full strength for mature plants or diluted with as much water as the tea for seedlings.
The vermicompost can be harvested from the container at any time there is sufficient or when it is at least a third full but be careful to return to the container any worms found in the compost, otherwise you will deplete your worm numbers.
The vermicompost can be used like any other organic compost but again is particularly useful when planting out seedlings or bagging (potting) up plants by adding to the planting hole or potting mix.
Earthworms are a natural part of soil life and are very beneficial. Earthworm farming is a way of using their usefulness and is a rapidly increasing garden culture. Have a go – you won’t be disappointed.
