Thursday 2 June 2011

Our application to join the composting elite!

We have a wormery!!

Well, it's not like it turned up today. We won it on ebay over a month ago and it was located near to our cousin who picked it up and brought it down last weekend for us. We went to collect the worms today!

The worms were bred only 7 miles away, can't get more local than that for a worm breeder!

Here is how the process went:

First of all we put the bedding block in 6 litres of water as stated on the packet...



I have used this stuff before and it is amazing how it turns into such a large quantity of material after it has absorbed the water...



We then put the 1st tray on top of the base. You have to put a cardboard disk in the tray and then put the bedding (pictured above) on top.



They say that if you just left the worms in the coco bedding it would be too sterile for them and they would look to seek pastures new and escape! Not what we want. I read on the internet that adding a handful of shredded paper and a small shovel full of dirt straight out of the flower bed will make the worms a lot more comfortable..

Amy got her hand dirty and mixed all the bedding up..



Well, it was time to add the worms! They came in small tubs so we emptied them a tub at a time...



Here is the first pot of the little wriggly wrigglers....




After all the worms were in we had to leave the lid off for an hour. Worms are light sensitive so will burrow in to the substrate if they are in contact with the light. After an hour, we went back to check and there was only one worm in site (Amy has declared this one as her favourite), so I presume everything is all good. We have now fed them their first kitchen scraps ( the ends of the courgettes and peppers and some teabags).

Here is the proud wormery owner...



Back in April I said in this post that Amy wanted worms and I wanted bees and we now have both! So that is a nice little achivement.

We will try to keep you updated with how the worms are doing. I follow quite a few blogs where people have wormeries and I do enjoy reading about them.

Can you believe it! Vegetable updates to follow later today or tomorrow.

Have a good day!

Martin

4 comments:

  1. Welcome to the world of wriggly wormies!
    Hope all goes OK for you, they're great to have around! x

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  2. You'll have some lovely compost in no time.

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  3. I'm going to sound stupid now but... How do they work?

    You feed them kitchen scraps like you would a normal compost heap and collect the worm'ified compost at the bottom somehow?

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  4. Interesting post! I like the photo's showing how you set it up and I'm looking forward to worm stories :) Mo

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