GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - Wormeries

AL_n · 04-04-2012, 11:02 AM posted to uk.rec.gardening

Farmer Giles wrote in news:-ZidnYWtPsT4-
:

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.

FG,
Thanks for the interesting suggestion.

I wondered if I could somehow employ worms to speed up the breakdown of new
composting material, such as grass clods, stable sweepings and grass
clippings (all of which I have a ton of. Using my present system (covering
it with two layers of tarp, it will take about 2 years to convert into
loam. Even if I could add a couple of buckets-full of the stuff to a
wormery and get some useful material from it within a couple of weeks, it
would make a wormery worthwhile. I wonder if your suggested option could be
used for this pourpose.

I gather that the commercially-sold wormeries are designed to produce
liquid fertilizer, and not much else. Is that correct?

Al