Deep winter and worms

I have put the wormery in the sheltered part of the garden, covered the top layer with cardboard and made sure that any worms which wanted to escape, had an opportunity to do so. Last year this worked fine and they were ready to start again in the spring. This year it's been COLD so I don't know what I'll find.

Why is this worth doing? Well, in August I took some tomato seedling orphans - you know, the ones that grow by themselves in the compost heap - and put them in a medium sized pot with almost pure worm castings. They went into our south facing conservatory and until the freeze in January, were producing flowers and tomatoes. Not a lot of tomatoes, but enough for my sandwiches once or twice a week. They are sweet too. I've been picking them as they look like they are changing colour and bringing them in the house to ripen.

The conservatory is unheated by the way. Warm in the sun and cold at night. I suspect that the brick keep the place heated by absorbing daytime heat and providing just enough background heat to keep it going.

September 2009 update

My worms were trying to escape from the bottom which is not a good sign. I thought they had plenty of chew over but they are unhappy. I took out the bottom layer which looks like very rich compost and put it on the courgette and an over wintering tomato (we have a south facing conservatory). I carefully put some new material on the bottom and returned the undigested 'stuff' to the top - sweet corn cobs and apples. But, they still tried to escape. Of course, escape means drowning because the bottom bucket has worm 'juice'.

I have now taken out everything again, put some soil, cardboard and fiborous material on the bottom, then a few of the things they really like plus more cardboard. I took out the soggy paper which didn't have any worms munching on it. Now I hope they will stay put and be happy.

Two friends have said that all their worms died so I feel lucky that I might have caught them in time.

18 May 2009

The worms are doing well - well, they aren't looking for an exit route through the holes in the bottom of the container. I realise that I need to have two compost bins in the kitchen - wormery and compost - since the worms don't like onions or citrus and we use a lot of both.

I can't remember if they like bananas so I'm keeping them out. However, I now compost cardboard - loo rolls into the wormery in small pieces, and other card in the compost after a thorough wetting.

I hanker after a bigger wormery that is a little less Heath Robinson and a bit easier to take apart and put together. To extract the wormery 'juice', I have to hold the top bit and gently prise the bottom container off with my foot, while wiggling the top. Not difficult, just a little cumbersome.

After the winter

I put my wormery near the compost heap for the winter and checked it last week. The worms were happy and there were lots of little, tiny ones, attacking the food waste. Success!

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Lots of worms

The wormery has been in the shade for a few weeks and I've been watering it to keep the worms happy but not adding much to it. I had put the next layer in and today I thought I'd check to see if the worms had migrated up so that I could use the worm compost in the bottom layer. I took the insert out and there were still plenty of worms in the bottom layer so I checked the second layer to see if any of the worms had moved up as well. They had! So there are now lots of very fat, happy worms but on two layers so I can't get at the compost yet.

I must admit that it's very exciting. I'll add some more chopped up vegetable peelings and loo roll holders shortly to the top layer.

I'm now keen to see if the compost makes a difference to growing plants. It has to be good and of course, there's the 'juice' that comes from keeping the wormery well watered.

Success!

The wormery had been left to itself for a little while. I moved it to a permanently shady spot and hadn't added anything recently. It's been cool and rainy as well.

This weekend, the sun shone instead of the rain we were predicted so I thought I'd start again and follow all the advice of my worm expert since I wasn't convinced that much was happening. I gently tipped the wormery into a large plastic bucket and look what I found! Lots of fat, happy worms and a lot of brown, wet, sludge which doesn't smell. I had been watering the wormery since my expert says that they need to be kept damp.

I've now gently put them back on a layer of compost and some shredded newspaper and added the divider and a layer of kitchen waste for them to crawl up to so I can extract the good stuff from underneath.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep watering them and using the 'juice' to feed the blueberries which are now inside the conservatory so the birds won't be tempted to strip my bushes. You'd think they'd be happy with the strawberries I didn't get around to netting until today but I think they like blueberries even more.