How To Breed Worms To Fertilize Your Organic Garden

Setting up a worm farm is easy. You can either buy a ready-made one or make one yourself for next to nothing. They are easy to maintain and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

A worm farm is an ideal alternative to compost heaps, for a house or apartment. It is compact and odor-free and even the most basic ones provide enough fertilisers to nourish a small city garden.

There are three types of compost worms: tigers, blues and red wrigglers. These can be bought in hardware stores, fishing shops, garden centres and online.

These worms have a large appetite and consume half their body weight in food every day. They thrive in large numbers. These qualities make them excellent recyclers.

Worm castings are perfect for gardens. They are full of nutrients and increase the mount of essential microbial activity in soil. The liquid run-off from a worm farm makes a wonderful organic fertiliser.

Worms will produce an egg capsule every seven to 10 days. Each capsule contains about six to twenty worms and will hatch in about 21 days.

In a small Do It Yourself farm, you can start with 1000 to 2000 worms.

Worms can handle most kitchen scraps. They don't like garlic, chilli, citrus, onions, dairy, meat, seafood, fat, bones or oily food.

Eggshells are great. Just crush them up before adding them to the farm as worms need the calcium. You can also feed them thin layers of grass and weeds, but avoid large garden prunings because they will take too long to break down.

The smaller the organic material the faster the worms can process it. So it is good idea to chop up their food.

They need to adapt to a new diet, so don't change their food rapidly. Introduce new foods a little at a time and avoid a deep layer of uneaten food.

Worms thrive on cracked, milled grain and other high-protein vegetable food.

How To Build Your Own Worm Farm

You'll need three polystyrene foam vegetable packing boxes
Old shade cloth or mosquito mesh
Mushroom compost or mature compost
Kife
Compost worms
Kitchen scraps
Watering can and water
Newspaper
Two Bricks

How to do it:
Get The polystyrene foam boxes. The one on top must have a lid and the one on the bottom should be without drainage holes because it collects worm juice.
If the top and middle boxes don't have drainage holes and gaps around the rim for ventilation, mark and cut out eight drainage holes in the base of two boxes and eight ventilation holes in the lid.

Line the middle box with shade cloth. This stops the worms wriggling into the bottom box and drowning. Fill almost to the top with mushroom or matured compost. Add the worms.

Place 3-4cm deep layer of scraps in the top box. Place the top box squarely on the middle box, then gently water well. Drain for five minutes, then squarely place the top and middle boxes on the bottom box. Fit the lid, holding it in place using the bricks, keeping the ventilation holes clear.

Place the farm on level ground somewhere sheltered and out of direct sun.

How To Use The Worm Juice
Worm juice makes an excellent fertiliser but it is strong on its own. Dilute it with water by about 1:10 before using it to water plants. It should look like weak tea. Castings also make a mild, slow-release fertiliser. They can be diluted with water or added directly to soil: crumble a 10cm piece around a shrub or pot plant.

If you're going on holidays, just add your usual scraps and some extra shredded paper. Worms should easily survive for about six weeks.