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.

Back from a cycling holiday and the worms are ALIVE!

We left for a week's holiday, hoping to cycle in the (sunny) French countryside and decided that you can't ask someone to look after the wormery without notice. I tore up the Amazon cardboard that wrapped the books I bought to read on holiday (note: this was a good idea because it rained quite a lot and I read 3 books in 4 days). I put it on the top of the wormery, watered it and hoped for the best.

When I looked in the box yesterday, the torn card was in place but just underneath it was a lot of very fat, happy looking worms. This may be because it was very wet and cool here as well as in the south of France so that they didn't get cooked in the sunshine. I'm still planning to put the wormery in the garage but until the weather picks up, it's not a priority.

I'm watering the worms and using the juice to water the plants - especially the peppers, tomatoes and courgette.

Photo above is from the holiday - grapevines, poppies and lavender...with a few olive trees nearby. No sun but on this occasion, no rain either.