On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:11:00 +0100, Farmer Giles
wrote:

On 03/04/2012 20:12, AL_n wrote:
I am sure this subject will have been discussed here before, but as
Google has done away with its 'groups search' feature, I was unable to
check!

Can anyone please enlighten me:

a) For a single person (with a larger than average garden, who doesn't
throw away much, if any, vegetable matter from the kitchen, are wormeries
worth the trouble?

And if so,
b) what are the pros and cons of maintaining one?

And,
c) can anyone provide instructions, or a link to a good guide to
starting an maintaining a home-made wormery?


Thank you,

Al

I've had wormeries for years, but they can be a lot of trouble -
particularly in winter. An easy way that I have found to get the benefit
of wormeries, using your kitchen waste in the process, is this. Get a
large plastic container - I make home-brewed beer, and find the old
5-gallon brewing buckets ideal for this - and make a number of small
holes in the botton - about 1cm in diameter.

Put this container somewhere in the garden - in an area that's
convenient, and particularly one that you'd like to improve the
fertility of - and then just tip your kitchen waste in to it. In the
fullness of time composting worms will find the bin and colonise it (and
dreed rapidly). fill the bin with your waste and keep it topped up -
starting more bins when you run out of space. The advantage of this
method is that the worms will leave the bin when it gets too cold or dry
for them and go into the soil - returning when things return to normal.
The soil around the bin will improve enormously - and you can move the
bin after a while to spread the benefit. After several months you will
need to empty the bin and start again - using the residual worm cast
material in your composts, etc.

I understand that the best worms for compost are brandling worms which
can be bought at fishing shops .... and are not cheap.
They are not the same as earthworms, yet can be found in piles of
rotting manure.
So where do they come from? How do they get into compost bins and into
manure?

Pam in Bristol