AchmatK
Honorary Master
What kitchen scraps are you throwing in? I assume no meat, chicken, bones, fish, etc.
-
Join the MyBroadband community
South Africa’s biggest forum. Discuss, discover, and connect with thousands of members.
-
Question of the Day: If you were buying a TV today, which brand would you choose?
beginner fruit/veg garden
- Thread starter Inevitability
- Start date
AchmatK
Honorary Master
I have a precast pond not being used that I can use for a worm farm.
Inevitability
Expert Member
I only avoid those cos it will get smelly and attract the wrong kind of decomposers. From what I've Googled, the worms will eat almost anything that decays, except overly acidic stuff that irritates their skin. So even the above stuff in moderation will probably be ok.
That's gonna be awesome! Harvesting the liquid will need some planning, cos you're gonna need a hole at the bottom for it to drain out of. Or you could use a trick that I've seen on YouTube to feed the worms in a pattern that will encourage them to migrate from one side to the other.
So... start feeding on one end (say right side) and each time you feed , you move a little to the left... after a few months you've encouraged the worms to migrate towards the food and then you harvest all of the compost itself from the worm farm. Dunno if that's practical, just an idea I've seen
It does smell a little bit... It is still decaying food waste. But if you don't keep your kitchen scraps too long before adding to the worm farm, that helps (I feed them weekly), and then you should always bury the scraps a bit into the 'soil' that's already in there.Thanks, will give it a go - is it stinky?
Also, if you overfeed them (...feed more than they can eat before feeding again), the food waste will rot rather than compost and that's gonna smell bad. If you have excess food waste, try 'trench-composting'. And soon your worms will have multiplied enough to chow all of your kitchen waste.
i send it all in! But we don't eat much citrus.
AchmatK
Honorary Master
I won't have to do that as my precast pond has a bottom drain so I'll be able to raise it on some bricks similar to what you did.
AchmatK
Honorary Master
My precast pond that I could use for a worm farm. Brick for scale. 
Inevitability
Expert Member
Red worms sell (retail) for like R300/kg ... you gonna be in business soon!
When I first got the worms, I created an Excel spreadsheet with some conservative estimates ... If you start with 100 worms you could have 1 million within 70 weeks (but, at those numbers, you'll need to feed them around 50kg of food a day!)
AchmatK
Honorary Master
Now to find a supplier this side. Would I get it at a bait shop.
Also, should I place it in full sun or shade, and do I cover it with a plastic sheet or leave it open?
Inevitability
Expert Member
Bait shop should be fine... They are also called Kariba worms. The mug-sized containers sell for around R30 this side (...or that's what I saw written on the container I was given)
Should be around 50 worms in there. I suggest you start in a 5L ice-cream container so the worms will be confined to a smaller space and make it easier to find each other to mate. Also, it's more compact for feeding. You can skip the paranoia I had and flood it every week and get the liquid fertiliser from it. Keep the lid on to prevent drying out.
Start collecting leaves, grass and any garden waste already from now and filling up the pond. Here at the office-park where I work, I asked the garden services guys to keep the bags of leaves they usually rake up and chuck into the skip. Now's the perfect time cos leaves will start falling by the ton soon. You can even use those leaves to mulch your garden. Works like magic cos it keeps the weeds from getting any sunlight and they can't take over the bare patches on your garden. Plus they will eventually compost into rich soil. So you almost can't have enough of that s#!t
The guys here probably gave me like 100 bin bags in total last autumn/winter... I'm still using leaves from that stash!
Once the pond is loaded with your leaves, leave it open to collect any rain so the leaves get soaked.
When you throw in the worms, cover it with cardboard to keep in the moisture and keep out the birds. A layer of grass might work, but cardboard will definitely work. The cardboard will compost after a couple of months so just add more when it does. I've seen a guy YouTube run an experiment where he only had shredded cardboard in a worm farm (and enough moisture), and they thrived in it.
Lemme know when you it the 1 million mark!
I've had a worm farm since the end of 2005 so have learnt quite a bit over the years. I bought the kit at a craft market - it consists of 3 black containers (I think they are called meat trays) and a lid. The top two trays have holes in the bottom and the bottom one has one of those plastic taps that plastics shops sell. It has a plastic lid. We have made a couple of sets for family and friends - easy to do with a cordless drill, and we used a slatted wood lid for one. When the top one is full, I empty the middle one into a bucket, rescuing as many worms as I feel like, and put those worms into the old top one which now goes to the middle, and the process starts again. It takes us about 3 months to fill a tray. Now here's the controversial bit: the kit I bought came with about a cup's worth of ordinary Cape earthworms, so that's what I have had ever since. The first day I went round and looked under my flowerpots and got about a half cup more. Those first worms have reproduced prolifically and I have given away lots, and they have produced heaps of garden gold compost, not to mention the worm 'tea'. Maybe in some parts of the country you can't use earthworms, but I see no need to use non-indigenous worms here in Cape Town. We don't put in watermelon (gets too mushy) or orange peel (too tough) or bread (goes mouldy), but otherwise they chomp their way through all our kitchen vege waste (including onion & garlic peel), sweetcorn cobs, mango pips, torn up brown envelopes etc. They LOVE avos, including the pip, but not flower stalks. One thing is vital: it must not be in the sun. We learnt that the hard way.
Anything from the onion family essentially is apparently a no-no (or so we have been told). Onions, spring onions, garlic and the like should be avoided.
MrT, I'm not sure why they say that. We use onions of various sorts almost every day, garlic not nearly as often, and all the peels go into the worm bin. No complaints from the worms. When I do the +- 3 monthly tray turnaround, all those peels have been chomped by the worms and turned into compost.
Inevitability
Expert Member
Me too... Onion peels always go into the worms farms. I can hazard a guess that because the ratio is low, it doesn't "upset" my worm farm's balance. Maybe if I only threw in onions or predominantly onions, it might be a problem. Just my guess.
Funny thing... last week while 125mm of rain was falling, I was busy watering my garden!
Cos the bath tub was giving me so much liquid I had to empty the bucket otherwise it would've gone to waste... So I was walking around the garden in the rain with my watering can getting rid of 50L of worm juice. Neighbours must have thought that gardening made me lose my mind.
Thank you. I have learned something. I am going to start my own work farm, probably this weekend. Because space is a bit of problem in my town house complex, I'll need to pick the site/spot carefully.
Inevitability
Expert Member
AchmatK
Honorary Master
Found these in a damp shady spot in my garden. About 10 in one garden spade and only a couple of cm deep.I'm not exaggerating when I say you can even start one inside of a sock drawer
Get started, and you'll figure it out as you go.
Will these work for a worm farm? I can probably get a few hundred with very little effort.
