More wormies on the way....or...Free nutrition for your garden!

The worm farm I bought a few months back is in full production, I have both trays going and the worms are doing a great job. I get worm juice from it regularly to put on my plants and I've been digging out some of the castings lately to add to plants I'm potting up.

I love the fact that I'm not having to purchase fertiliser (organic or otherwise) and I also LOVE the fact that there is less green foody type waste going out in our bin.

But I haven't been able to put all our fruit and veg scraps in there, solely because we produce a lot more of them than my two trays of worms can get through in a reasonable time.

And, I would like more castings. I have been potting up a lot of plants (all fruit trees are going in pots so I can take them with me when we move, hopefully in the next year or two. The moving deadline has been put waaaaay back.) and have been having to purchase soil to do this. I have added castings to some pots which pads out the soil I've bought, as well as adding more nutrition to the pots. But I would like to increase this.

So, very exciting hehe, I've just taken receipt of these babies today:

Two more trays to add to my worm farm!

I am ridiculously happy that they've arrived (not sure what that says about my place in life, that I'm jumping for joy at two plastic trays) and can't wait to set them up.

And the kids are getting a lot of mileage out of the large cardboard box they came in, so we're all happy.

Wanna see my pets?

I think I promised a picture of all my molding, worm chewed kitchen scraps a while back, so here it is/they are....

You may want to enlarge it to see properly.

Or maybe not.

Those bright stripes are sunlight, and the worms disappear into the muck pretty darn quickly once they're exposed to it. I may have to relocate the whole shebang during the summer, I'm not quite sure how much sun this particular corner gets.

Very cool, huh?

Or is it just me..........

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: