Worms, worms glorious worms

Yesterday i had no plans to do anything in the garden. But I was aimlessly wandering in the back yard before the kids woke up (as you do), staring at my garlic and wondering if it had grown overnight, and I noticed a slow dripping from the tap on one of my wormfarms. So i had a look and found it was absolutely chokkers with worm juice. For animals that dont drink they produce a surprising amount of sewerage.



Worm hotel!

 The last time I left the bottom tray completely full of juice, by the time i drained it, it was full of rotting drowned worms, which made the level above putrid and i had to empty the entire thing and it took a huge amount of scrubbing to get the smell off my hands afterwards (I ended up even scrubbing my hands with lemons to get rid of the dead worm smell). So I gave them a quick hosing through the top and drained and bottled about 15 litres. For my little weeny garden, two worm farms produces about as much worm juice as it needs. I bought a big bottle of Seasol when we first moved in, and once the worms got cracking and paying off their 4 storey black plastic palace i stopped using it entirely.

And since I stopped messing around with it and trying to force feed them the worm farms have been largely maintenance free. I inherited one from my father in law, and I bought another one thinking they could chew through all our kitchen scraps. After a couple months of piling the scraps in, I ended up with a putrid stinking mess that the worms were hiding from in the bottom drip tray. After that near miss I slowed it down, stopped force feeding them and let them do their thing.

One last thing, I can recommend running 2 farms....a few months ago i fed some radish leaves to one of them and it turned to mustard gas and killed every last worm in the entire farm. They’d all crawled down into the bottom tray were they were gassed to death and I had to repopulate it with worms from the other farm.

So there you have it, Worms 101 J