Looking after the Good Guys: Worms

Worm farms are a good solution for people who don't have room for a compost bin, and even for those who don't have a garden. You can buy a worm farm, or make one from polystyrene fruit containers or wooden boxes. You will need a surface area of around 30x50 cm for each person in the house. A cover with airholes in it will protect your worms from birds and stop the farm from drying out too quickly. Worms need to be kept moist, but not wet and cool but not frozen! The farm needs to have drainage and needs to be watered periodically to keep it moist.

The easiest way to get started is to buy some worms from your local nursery or garden centre. They will have the right species of worm for your area and they are packaged with some bedding materials. You can just pour the worms and their bedding material into the box and add some kitchen scraps to get them going.

If you add too much food or greenwaste it will start to rot before the worms get around to eating it. Start with a small amount and add more when it has all been eaten. As the worms multiply you will be able to add more scraps at a time. Worms can eat about half their body weight in food per day. If you use a starter pack with about 1000 worms in it, you can feed them about 250g of scraps to start with.

You can add anything to your worm farm that is leftover from preparing your dinner and you can also add some garden wastes. Worms need their food to be chopped up a bit for them. You can feed them kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, vacuum cleaner dust, paper, egg shells, and weeds. Worms don't digest seeds, so if you feed them weeds that have gone to seed you may need to further compost, or alternatively solarise, the worm castings before you use them in the garden. You can add small amounts of chopped up citrus to the worm farm, but meat scraps are likely to attract rats and mice and are best avoided. If you feed your pets worming tablets, their poo can kill your worms.

In a bought worm farm, when the bottom tray fills up, you can add another tray to the top of the old one. Put some scraps in the top tray and when the worms have eaten all the scraps in the bottom, they will migrate up to the top one. When all or most of the worms have moved into the 'penthouse' you can use put the castings from the bottom tray into the garden. In a small amount of space you can stop hundreds of kilos of food from going to landfill in a year. This will reduce your contribution to the greenhouse effect and will improve your garden at the same time.

For more information refer to our other helpful information sheets on Alternative Pest Control and Companion Planting.

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