Squiggly squirmy, luverly wormies

Living in a small house on a smaaaallllll piece of land like we do, means we have not much room for a traditional compost bin. Nor an ongoing need for one.

However, recently I have decided to make more of a concerted effort to grow some of our own vegetables and fruits. Now, unless I want to be buying bags of compost and cow poop on a regular basis (which I have done in the past), I need a way of feeding my crops.

Enter....vermiculture. Or worm farming as it is otherwise known.

Perfect for our small property and gardening needs, no smell, and helps cut down on the amount of rubbish our family sends to landfill.

Knowing that I could buy a worm farm and worms from my local council cheaper than I could at our garden centre or hardware chain, I packed up the kids last week and we traipsed off to our local council rooms.

It's now set up in a dim corner of our front yard and is already producing 'worm juice'.....actually worm pee but I know my 5 year old would have nothing to do with it if I called it that.

After a couple of days, it occurred to me in a duh moment that I could quite possibly have made my own worm farm from materials I had laying around the place. And the internet tells me that is correct, I could have.
Not sure where my brain was that day.

Oh well.

Here is a great link that explains how to make a worm farm at home:

How to make a worm farm

You'll need compost worms, red wrigglers or the like, as regular earthworms will not survive in your worm farm. These are easily available in boxes of 1000 from hardware stores and garden centres. Or maybe online if you can't find them round your area.

Give them all your kitchen scraps, except meat, dairy, citrus, onion and anything with lots of sugar. They will get through it faster if you chop it up small, although it does feel rather odd to be hand chopping all my kitchen scraps with my wormies comfort in mind.

As well as worm pee which is apparently liquid gold for your plants, after a few months you will also have a tray of castings that you can add to your garden or your plant pots.
This is my plan for feeding my baby blueberry trees, my lemon tree that looks like it might produce for the first time in just about forever, my new feijoa tree and my baby spinach plants. All the above are in pots except for the lemon tree.

I'm wondering now what else I can add to my garden menagerie......plant wise that is, as hubby won't let me torment the neighbours by turning the rest of our front yard into a chicken run. He may have a point, the unit behind ours is for sale, not sure prospective buyers would appreciate a chicken pen as our combined street frontage.

Maybe a goat.....?

Watch this space: