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.

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.

YouTube Wormery videos

Why didn't I look here first? YouTube has taken over my life - there is something here for everything I want to know. You want to know about wormeries? Look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvmy9jZgHn8

There are so many videos to choose from - thank you everyone!

Sage advice from an experienced wormery friend

My work colleague has now kindly shared her experience of keeping worms. She says that you need lots of them - 200-300 and that she bought them and some worm food to help them settle in. She said that if you have a semi mature compost heap, they would consider that good food as well and that they must be kept damp all the time.

I think I will follow her advice and move them into the garage where they won't have to put up with the variations of temperature (although it's quite cool now). Her other useful tips are:

• water them with a fine rose
• shred new food and add it in by gently digging
• you should have a bed of garden compost and non edibles and then put your vegetable offerings on top of that
• you can put about 1 lb a day of vegetable offerings in the commercial wormery that she has
• the water that drips through needs to be diluted if the worms are working efficently.
  

Well, we're off on a cycling holiday so I will leave them with some food and water for the week and hope that they appreciate being left in peace. I promise to then move them into the garage (they don't smell) and look after them. I will double the population and make sure the whole things stays sweet and take more photos so you can see how this is going.