(Music plays)
(Kevin Handreck) OK, so you’ve decided to recycle your kitchen scraps.
Good! And you’ve probably been thinking of compost bins,
or a big heap over in the garden somewhere.
Well I want to show you another way that you can do it,
and that’s using earthworms.
And down here we’ve got an earthworm farm,
and it’s very simple to make.
A Styrofoam box like this is an ideal home for your earthworms.
No problem with drainage, they can’t get drowned in that,
and the sides insulate them from the worst of the heat and cold.
Now the other important things that you need are
some sort of composting material.
Partly decomposed compost is quite good,
otherwise composted cow manure, sheep manure, horse manure,
something like those sort of things, just as a start for the bedding materials.
So we put that in there like that; smooth it over a bit.
You don’t need too much of it,
perhaps just a wee bit more than that to start off with.
But seeing as you’re going to be putting scraps in there
you don’t want to fill it right up to start off with.
OK, so we’ve got a bit there.
Now that’s a little bit dry, so what I’m going to do is just
moisten it up a bit
because the worms that we’re going to be using are tiger worms.
Now these can be bought at any fishing store.
I just bought them at the local fishing store.
Tiger worms, about a hundred in there, for $2.60, something like that.
And they like quite moist conditions, rich moist conditions,
and under those conditions they really thrive
and they chew through your scraps very quickly.
So that’s nice and moist for them there now,
it’s quite a good home for them.
Let’s tip them in. Let’s see if we can get them out of there.
Just put them in, in clumps in a few places,
and we’ll bury them in over there like that.
OK, now perhaps we’ll just pop a little bit more
on the top of them there,
like so.
Right, now
the way to feed them is any of your kitchen scraps,
perhaps just break it up just a little bit.
If you’ve got really, really big bits
you can just break them up a little bit,
but bury the material in heaps.
They can congregate in that, it’ll rot down there,
and then they can come and use it as food.
And because food scraps, particularly citrus peels,
are fairly acid it’s necessary from time to time,
say every two, three weeks, to just give a sprinkling of lime
or dolomite over the surface of the bed here.
That keeps it from going really sour. Nice and sweet there now.
It keeps the pH around about seven, and that’s what the earthworms like.
OK, now finally we’ve got to protect them
from the birds of the neighbourhood.
This is just a bit of weed mat folded over several times.
It’s good as a covering because it allows oxygen in,
and the worms need oxygen,
but it also allows the water in, and that’s also necessary, too,
the bed has to be kept moist. And of course we have to keep that on
and so we put something heavy on it to stop it from blowing away in the wind.
Well there you are you’re a farmer, an earthworm farmer.
(Music plays)
This is where I keep my earthworm farm.
It’s right on the ground under shade cloth,
and that keeps the worms nice and cool, and that’s very important,
particularly in the summertime of course.
I set this one up about three months ago,
but now I want to use some of the castings and bedding material that’s in here.
It’s called vermicompost. I want to use some of that on the garden,
so what I did a couple of weeks ago is
I put some food down here in this corner
and what should have happened
is that the worms should have come across here to get that food,
and therefore separated themselves from the vermicompost.
Well let’s dig down here and see where... ah, look, there they are.
Look, there’s plenty of them there,
so that should be pretty free over here of worms.
Now this vermicompost is just as rich
as any other compost that you can make,
if not richer, so you can use it anywhere in the garden,
or on your pot plants that you might use ordinary compost.
It’s ready to use right now.