Worm Farming

In an effort to improve sustainable living we invested in a Wromery in June 2004. Live composting worms live in it. They eat house hold and garden waste breaking it down to a rich compost 'Black Gold' for the garden. The unit came from Element Green in Cork. Water drains through a tap at the bottom of the composter. Added to water ten parts to one this 'Liquid Gold' makes a savage fertlizer. The lucky flowers to be watered with it have bloomed all last summer, snd the vine has a large bounty of grapes. There are three palstic layers with holes in them, a layer is added when the previous one is full, and the worms work their way up the stack. The bottom layer is removed and ready for use when the top one is filled.

The top layer of our unit was added in August 05 so it is a slow process, the first harvest of compost was in April 06. The entire contents of the tray had been eaten, and was full of a lovely rich crumbly eaten so the compost. The second tray is almost ready so the worms have been busy. There were hundreds of white baby worms in tray so numbers were increasing however ants got in in late 07 and appeared to eat all the eggs and the population plummeted. I purchased more worms from over the internet. Cannisters with some olive oil in them were places under the legs to twarth the ants.
CregorNews 1 - Ants 0..... A current yield is about every six months, and the plants are mad for it. I now put some newspaper on the top to stop heavy rain washing through the farm.

The worms are vegeterians, and don't eat meat or fish. The food is added in layers, and they start to eat it after it's started to decompose. Best practice it appears is to keep a large tub in the kitcken for scraps to be added to the wormery when full. Leaves when added are best cut up a bit, only small amounts of grass have been added, dead headed flowers were fine. Pizza when added just went to a funny mush so is probally best left out.
The wormery is kept under the shade of a tree in the garden, it was in the garage for a while early on but this was not sutible.