The Wormery Environment

THE WORMERY ENVIRONMENT

A wormery is also known as a home vermiculture system or a worm box. No matter what you call it, however, the idea remains the same – you’re building a self-contained environment in which worms can create rich soil out of your everyday kitchen waste.

Despite what they may seem, wormeries are not completely self-contained ecosystems. Worms, like any other creature or household pet, have to be taken care of properly and be regularly monitored in order to survive. Although much of the work is done by the worms and nature, it’s your job to take into account issues of temperature, moisture, oxygen, light, and even pH.

  • Temperature

Although worms can survive in a variety of climates and temperatures, the ones most often found in a wormery thrive between 13 and 25 degrees Celsius (note: this means the temperature of the soil – not the air). Anything too warm or above 29 degrees Celsius could be fatal, and anything too cold or below 10 degrees might slow the worms down too much to make them effective. If you live anywhere where outside temperatures are extreme, you may need to consider indoor placement for your wormery.

  • Moisture

Worms are notorious for coming out when it rains, coating the pavement and providing a buffet for birds. That’s because worms breathe through their skin, and that skin must be moist in order for respiration to occur effectively. The soil and bedding in your wormery has to maintain a high level of moisture in order to allow the worms to thrive – usually about 75 to 90 percent.

Although the food and plant waste particles will provide some moisture, it may be necessary to monitor levels to be sure the worms aren’t drying out. You can add water if the wormery gets too dry.

  • Oxygen

As mentioned above, worms breathe through their skin. Other than that, however, their needs are similar to that of any other organism – they need adequate access to oxygen and a way for the carbon dioxide they release to circulate. For a wormery to be effective over the long term, air circulation must play a role in the construction.

Air circulation plays another role, too. A wormery that doesn’t get proper ventilation could quickly become a smelly system.

  • Light

Worms are not fans of the light. In fact, if they get too much exposure, their bodies will dry out and they could die. That’s why they live underground – and why you need to build a wormery that keeps out the light or that is kept in place where too much light won’t get in the way.

  • pH Levels

pH is what is used to measure the acidity or basicity of an organism. In humans, a good pH level is around 7.4, and it is maintained almost entirely by the body. That means we have to do little to control our own pH. Worms, however, are more sensitive to pH. They thrive best with a level of 7.0, although that number can vary by as much as 4.2 to 8.0.

Although this is a fairly large range, food and plant matter can drastically alter the pH of your wormery. For example, citrus fruits can drastically alter the pH to make it too acidic. You can test pH by using a pH meter for soil, which is typically available at most gardening stores.

Wormery Tip:
Ground up egg shells provide a quick and easy way to regulate the acidity in your wormery.

WHAT WORMS TO USE

The types of worms you use in your wormery does matter – especially if you want to get the kind of results that have practical use in your garden. That’s because you need worms that not only feed on food and plant matter in the soil, but ones that can survive the shallow dirt environment of the typical backyard wormery.

The recommended type of worm is a red worm, known as red wigglers or Eisenia foetida. Another common worm is Lumbricus rubellus, which is very similar in makeup to the red wigglers. Nightcrawlers (Lumbricus terrestris), which are the types of worms most people associate with fishing or backyard worms, should not be used for wormeries. They prefer to live in deeper soil, and won’t be able to thrive in the shallow bedding of your wormery.

Unfortunately, finding the right worms isn’t as easy as waiting for a rainy day and heading out to the sidewalk to see what you can scoop up; in most cases, you’ll need to specially order composting worms. You can usually find them at mail-order companies, online vendors, and many fishing stores (which sell the worms as bait). If you have access to a nutrient-rich compost or manure pile, you can also collect worms there, but there are no guarantees that you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Did You Know?
Eisenia foetida gets its name from a foul-smelling liquid they emit when handled too roughly. Foetida is Latin for “fetid” or “stinky.”

The cost of the worms will vary depending on where you purchase them. In most cases, you’ll buy them by weight. 500g of worms typically yields around 1,000 of the little critters, which can handle roughly 250g to 500g of kitchen waste per day. One of the greatest things about worms, though, is their ability to reproduce, so you should be able to let the little guys procreate on their own to keep your wormery well-stocked.

Did You Know?
Worms are hermaphroditic, which means they have both male and female sex organs. This makes reproduction easy, since every worm they come across is a potential mate. Baby worms hatch from eggs that are laid inside a cocoon – but only if the conditions in the wormery are just right.

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Vermicompost And How To Use It

How to Use Vermicompost

The whole purpose of your wormery is to get vermicompost, that rich fertilizer considered by many to the be the “black gold” of gardening. A small amount (about 60 ml) of vermicompost in one planting hole should make a considerable difference in plant health. You can also mix it in with the existing topsoil of houseplants and in gardens once or twice a year to boost growth. It can be used for yards, rosebushes, and other landscaping growth, as well, though it does best when placed close to the roots.

Many people also choose to make “vermicompost tea” for use as a spray or liquid application. This is a watered down version of vermicompost, and it can be easily applied over large areas with a sprayer. Companies sell compost tea makers, which can be used with vermicompost, or you can make your own.

In most cases, making tea means you simply “steep” the vermicompost in water for up to two weeks to yield a rich, liquid fertilizer. The traditional formula calls for a 3:9 ratio of vermicompost to water kept at room temperature. It must be stirred at least once a day, and you may want to add approved minerals or bubbling oxygen to enhance the richness of the tea. It is then sieved through a fine screen or cheesecloth and used as needed.

No matter what you do with the vermicompost, however, you should be proud of yourself for making such a difference in your life – and in your planet. By tapping into the power of the wormery, you are not only contributing to the environment in a positive way, but you’re also creating a generation of responsible global citizens who understand the delicate balance between the food we eat and the animals and plants that make it all possible.

A personal wormery lets you use worms to naturally compost many kinds of items for example:

  • fruits
  • vegetables
  • breads
  • cereals
  • paper products
  • soaked cardboard
  • egg shells

The worms produce compost from it a natural nutrient rich organic substance (vermicompost, or worm castings) – this can enrich soil for gardens, crops and house plants. Vermicompost has been determined as one of the best fertilizers available.

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Vermicompost Harvesting

Harvesting the Vermicompost

Although vermicompost is wonderful stuff for the garden, it’s not good for the worms. In fact, one worm’s vermicompost is another worm’s poison! It’s important to regularly harvest the vermicompost for your own use and to keep the worms healthy. Most wormeries will need to be “harvested” every three to six months.

There are three primary ways of harvesting the vermicompost: dumping and sorting, wormery rotation, or divide and dump.

Dumping and Sorting

This method is messy, but it gets the job done. If you have a smaller wormery, you can simply empty out the contents onto a table, gently scooping it into a cone shape. This will put the bedding at the bottom and all the rich vermicompost at the top. If you work in a well-lit area, the worms should naturally burrow out of the vermicompost and down to the darker bedding. This allows you to gather mounds of the vermicompost that is now free of worms. You can then gather up the worms to be returned to the wormery along with fresh bedding.

Wormery Tip:
When harvesting the vermicompost, be sure to look for small green or yellow drops. These are the “cocoons” of worm eggs. They should be gently returned to the bedding – far from the light – and with plenty of good food to eat to ensure they can hatch and provide more worms for your system. These baby worms especially love apple cores and melon rinds.

Wormery Rotation

In this method, you have to do less work, but it reduces the amount of space in your wormery by half. As soon as you’ve allowed your wormery to run for a few months, you can simply push everything to one side. Add fresh bedding to the empty side and start putting your food waste over there. In a few more months, the worms should have abandoned the older vermicompost side and taken up in the fresh side. You can simply scoop up the vermicompost on the now abandoned side and start all over again.

Divide and Dump

This method is less work overall, but more wasteful in terms of the worms. You can remove between half and two-thirds of the contents of the wormery and place them directly in your garden. You’ll be removing the nutrient-rich vermicompost as well as the worms, but the worms should be able to live in the garden and continue a small portion of their work.

Those worms left behind should be offered new bedding. You can repopulate the wormery by adding more worms or by waiting for the existing ones to procreate. If you are waiting for them to repopulate themselves, however, remember that they won’t be able to handle as much kitchen waste until they’ve had a few months to hatch and grow.

When you harvest the vermicompost, it’s also time to replace the bedding. You should not reuse bedding that is dark, too smelly, or unrecognizable from its original form.

Wormery Tip:
A well-maintained wormery should have little to no smell (if anything, it should just smell earthy). If your wormery smells like rotting food or ammonia, you may need to provide better oxygenation by stirring the contents, or you may need to reduce the amount of food waste you put in. You should also avoid meat or dairy products.

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Maintaining Your Wormery

Maintaining Your Wormery

One of the greatest things about a wormery is that it requires little work on your part. The one thing you do have to provide regularly, however, is food.

Feeding the worms

The worms in your wormery can’t eat just anything. While most people use a wormery as an alternative or as a complement to a compost pile, there are certain foods that do well and certain foods that can harm the worms. In most cases, you can simply keep a bucket in your kitchen to collect all the food scraps to take to the worms either daily or on a more reasonable schedule for your lifestyle.

Wormery Tip:
Although you can feed your worms a little extra to get them through a few weeks if you’re going away on vacation, it’s a good idea to plan for someone to come feed them if you’ll be gone longer than 15 days.

Things to feed the worms include:

  • Vegetables and peels
  • Potato peels (in moderation)
  • Citrus fruits (in moderation)
  • Non-citrus fruits
  • Coffee grounds
  • Tea bags
  • Egg shells
  • Bread/bread products
  • Rice
  • Pasta
  • Flowers
  • Cereal
  • Sugar
  • Human hair (in moderation)
  • Leaves
  • Grass clippings (in moderation)
  • Paper products

Wormery Tip:
Grinding your kitchen waste is time-consuming (and often a little gross), but it will speed up the decomposition process.

Foods to avoid include:

  • Meat products
  • Dairy products
  • Pet litter
  • Anything with bones
  • Garlic
  • Spicy foods
  • Anything with insecticides or pesticides
  • Salt
  • Oil
  • Soap or other cosmetics
  • Weeds

Although small bits of dairy products (like cheese) won’t hurt the worms, it tends to produce a much stronger smell and may attract unwanted rodents into the wormery. Not only will that create competition for the worms’ food, but the rodents could also destroy the wormery. Also, if you use tea bags or paper waste from junk mail, be sure to remove non-organic structures like staples and the plastic windows from envelopes. They don’t break down, and it will be time-consuming to pick them out of the vermicompost later.

Wormery Tip:
Don’t be surprised if your worms have favorite foods. While they won’t avoid the newest food products in the wormery, they tend to prefer the wastes that have had a few days to be broken down by the natural bacteria and fungi in the system.

How you add the food to the wormery depends on your system. Some of the ready-made wormeries have complex systems in which you can bury the kitchen waste in up to twenty different locations, which can help keep smells down and make it easier for you to care for the wormery. One of the most important things to remember, though, is that you can’t put in more food waste than the worms can handle. If you pack the waste materials in there too tightly, there won’t be enough oxygen for the worms, and you could cause the entire system to come to a halt.

Wormery Tip:
If you find that your system has too much waste, simply let it rest for a few days. As long as your worms are still healthy, they should be able to catch up.

Keeping Your Worms Happy

Worms make very self-sufficient pets. Unlike your resident dog or cat, they don’t want to be handled or even watched very often. They prefer to be left alone in their dark, moist little containers, doing the work they do best.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can assume all is well. After all, it’s your job to monitor their environment to make sure they have the right temperature, moisture level, and acidity to thrive. Most people find that a quick check during feeding time is all that’s needed to keep things running smoothly.

Wormery Tip:
If you’ll be observing the worms for longer than a few minutes per day (for children or for scientific observation), it’s best to use a red light similar to those in dark rooms. You can place a piece of red plastic over a flashlight for quick and easy use.

With all this eating, digesting, and breeding taking place, it’s only natural that some of your worms will die, as well. The good news is that you rarely have to worry about dead worms. Because they are made of so much water, they decompose quickly and might even add to the richness of the vermicompost.

Did You Know?
The worms used in wormeries can live for as long as four years, though most of them never reach their first birthday.

If you are actually able to see worm carcasses, chances are there are too many dying too quickly. This could mean a problem with temperature, moisture, salt, or acidity in the wormery. Changing the bedding and monitoring levels should help to keep worm deaths low.

If you see mold, fungus, or other growths in your wormery, try not to worry. These things are a natural part of the decomposition process. However, maggots and flies can be damaging (and disgusting!). If you have a buildup of these types of insects, you may need to replace or clean the lid and find a more ventilated outdoor space to store it.

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Building Your Wormery

Building Your Wormery

Building a wormery doesn’t have to complicated or costly. Although there are many high-quality wormeries that you can purchase online or in organic gardening shops, most people already have all the materials they need to get started.

Wormery Containers

The size of your wormery depends entirely upon you. If you purchase one from a vendor, there should be several size options, ranging from large, elaborate systems to smaller, family-oriented ones. The larger ones tend to look like (and in fact, often are) plastic garbage cans. Smaller, simpler ones can be constructed in a plastic bottle or even in a shallow plastic bin.

The most important thing to take into account when choosing a wormery size is how much kitchen and plant waste you’ll be feeding into it. A family of four to six people typically produces two to three kilograms of kitchen waste per week, and is best served by a smaller box (30 by 60 cm) about one meter deep. Two people can usually use a box of the same height and width, but only half a meter deep.

If you’ll be building a larger wormery for use in a school or restaurant kitchen, you may need to consider purchasing a ready-made system, using several smaller ones, or upgrading to a larger box. You’ll also need to keep location in mind. There is no reason why a wormery can’t flourish inside your home or apartment, but many people find that it’s much easier to keep the wormery out of the day-to-day process of living.

The great thing about wormery boxes is that they don’t have to be fancy – the worms don’t care whether they’re living in a small wooden box or an elaborate poroous plastic vermiculture system. If you’ll be making one of your own, you can use:

  • Wooden pallets
  • Plastic containers
  • Converted garbage pails
  • Large jars with a spout at the bottom
  • Styrofoam coolers

Wormery Tip:
If you use a container that cannot be converted to include a spout at the bottom, your wormery won’t last forever. You need a way to drain the excess fluid that builds up as the worms do their work. Otherwise, they run the risk of drowning in their own “juices.”

Although you can use any of the above materials in making your wormery, some will do better than others. Plastic containers have the least amount of toxicity, but they don’t absorb any of the liquids, so they have to be drained more often. Styrofoam may release toxins into the worms’ environment over time, and metal containers left in the sun can increase the wormery temperature to dangerous levels. (They also tend to rust over time.) Many woods, including some types cedar and redwood, might release dangerous oils into the worms’ environment. Inexpensive and rot-resistant woods (like hemlock) tend to do fairly well, but they will eventually need to be replaced.

In addition to these concerns, there is also a matter of smell. Many people find that the complete systems you purchase often work best to control smell and keep the worms in the most healthy environment. Depending on your intent for the wormery, it may be worth the investment to buy a good system that won’t need to be replaced or upgraded over time.

Wormery Bedding

The area where your worm lives and works in is known as the “bedding.” It’s called this because in nature, the worms you’ll be dealing with live only in the top layers of the dirt – much more like the blankets on top of the earth than the deep soil underneath.

Wormery bedding can be made of a number of substances: corrugated cardboard, black-ink newspaper, peat moss, wood chips, leaf matter, coir, or pre-packaged wormery bedding.

Did You Know?
Coir is a fiber that comes from the outside of a coconut. Although it can be difficult to collect your own coir, it is fairly inexpensive to order online. It’s a great way to “recycle” the waste that comes from manufacturing plants in the tropics that process coconuts for human consumption.

No matter what material you use, it needs to be broken down and dampened. You can tear the cardboard or newspaper into small strips to get it ready. The bedding material should then be moistened and wrung out until it resembles a damp sponge.

Manure may also be used to supplement the bedding (though this isn’t recommended if the wormery will be kept in or nearby the house!). Never use dog, cat, pig, or human droppings, since they can carry disease. Cow or horse manure works just fine, and can actually really help the worms to thrive. Rodent droppings from pet rabbits or guinea pigs also work rather well.

Wormery Tip:
If you’ll be using manure to enrich your wormery, be prepared for other critters to call it home. Mites, centipedes, and grubs love manure, too, and they’ll find a way in! Most organisms won’t harm the wormery, but you should remove centipedes, since they might try to eat the baby worms and worm eggs.

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Garden Wormery Benefits

Benefits of the Garden Wormery

The biggest benefit of a wormery is the vermicompost, or worm manure. Vermicompost is an excellent fertilizer for plants and gardens, and research suggests that there is no alternative quite like it. Unlike animal manure, it has almost no scent, and it can be used on almost any type of plant. Some of its key characteristics include:

  • Improving the soil (making it more fertile and aerated)
  • Increasing the level of moisture retention (which means it takes less water to grow the plants)
  • Promoting healthy roots
  • Adding important enzymes and microorganisms to the soil
  • Increasing the yield of the garden or plant
  • Producing larger, tastier fruits and vegetables
  • Helping to keep diseases and pests at bay
  • Attracting natural earthworms already present in the soil

The benefits of a wormery aren’t all about the plants, however. While the primary purpose is to increase the quality and yield of plant life, wormeries are also a great way to save money, improve the environment, and help kids to learn about the ecosystem.

Saving Money

One of the most important aspects of any composting system is the amount of garbage reduction it offers. Kitchen scraps and other biowastes take up a large portion of the average family garbage output – in fact, experts estimate that 20 million tonnes of food is thrown away every year in the UK alone! With a wormery, you should be able to reduce your annual garbage output and make use of that waste.

Because you can make a wormery out of many materials you already have at home (an old plastic bin, shredded newspaper, etc.), you can also access rich fertilizer for almost no money. When used for personal or community gardens, the benefits mean more produce for your kitchen table at a fraction of the cost.

Improving the Environment

At an individual level, creating and maintaining a wormery means that your garbage output is reduced. When done at a larger level (such as for agriculture), the results have a much more important impact. The amount of energy necessary to run a wormery is fairly low, and the greenhouse gas emissions are greatly reduced.

Vermicompost is also incredibly good at replacing harmful insecticides and pesticides. It is a natural alternative to chemical plant fertilizers, which could, if applied on a world-wide level, play a major role in reducing the impact of farming on the environment. It is also becoming increasingly popular in third world countries, where soil quality has a negative impact on the viability of farming.

Helping Kids Learn

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of a wormery, however, is how it can benefit kids. Not only do children learn about the importance of recycling food waste and giving back to the earth, but the science of composting and vermiculture offers countless opportunities for education. From animal life cycles to the minerals in soil, kids get a hands-on learning approach to science.

Some of the learning opportunities in a wormery include:

  • How worms eat and break down plant matter
  • Worm life cycles and reproduction
  • Caring for living organisms
  • Building and construction of the wormery
  • The role of bacteria fungi in decomposition
  • Temperature and volume regulation
  • The chemicals and minerals that remain after the decomposition is complete
  • How these chemicals and minerals benefit new growth
  • Planting and growing a garden

This is a learning opportunity for many parents, too. Although wormeries tend to be easy to build and run, you may discover just how important it is to be mindful of your waste products as your worms set about the task of decomposing it all for you!

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