On 04/04/2012 11:02, AL_n wrote:
Farmer 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?
I don't know about commercial wormeries, but worms will produce lots of
very rich 'casts' after digesting your kitchen waste. This material will
appear in time at the bottom of your compost bin - and if you keep
adding more material the worms will move up into this. The method I
suggested would work very well with the material you have available -
but do try to provide a good general mix - although nothing much will
happen within a couple of weeks, it will take longer than that.
As someone has also said, you need to make sure that the bins are in
contact with the soil and kept moist (using normal kitchen waste
normally takes care of this, with any excess liquid just draining away
through the holes in the containers). This method works extremely well,
I've been doing it for years with excellent results. You can just leave
the bins winter and summer without having to worry about the bins
freezing, etc, the worms will just move in and out as the conditions
dictate.
After your bins have been in place for a while you will be amazed at the
number of brandling type worms underneath them when you lift them up.