Setup A Worm Farm For Your Organic Garden

Setup A Worm Farm For Your Organic Garden – Having an organic garden is a great way to produce fresh chemical free vegetables to feed your family and friends. When growing organic vegetables the success results can differ from each gardener due to a number of factors.

One main reason why beginner gardeners don’t grow healthy vegetables is because the soil they use doesn’t have enough nutrients for the plants. In order to enrich the soil a lot of gardeners add some compost to the soil.

An easily way that any gardener can produce their own compost is setting up a worm farm in their home. The compost produced by the worms can be used to grow healthy organic vegetables.

Worms are wonderful, they naturally take great care of the soil and make it richer and more aerated than it would otherwise be. Worms may be wriggly and slightly slimy, but the world and our gardens are a much richer place because of the hard work they do.

Worms naturally break up the soil, and consume an incredible amount of organic material, in fact as much as half their body weight every single day.

Setting up your worm farm

If you would like to buy a worm farm, you will find there are a lot of different worm farms for sale. There are so many different types, you might not know where to start looking. If you would like to add a unique touch to your new worm farm, you may want to think about making it yourself. It’s quite an easy thing to do, and it involves a bit of time and effort, and using some recycled materials that would have found themselves in a scrap heap somewhere.

Using a plastic crate

If you have, or you can get your hands on a nice plastic crate, you could potentially use this for your worm farm. Any plastic crate that comes with a lid is ideal, but you will need to drill some air holes into it.

Once you have drilled the holes, make sure you fit a tap to the bottom of the crate so you can drain out the fertilizer once it has been made. This fertilizer is wonderful and will work well on your garden once it has been diluted. Ideally about 1 part fertilizer to 10 parts of water should be sufficient, and can be added to your plants via a watering can.

Using A Styrofoam box

If you consider yourself to be ‘green’, you’ll no doubt be very aware of the fact that Styrofoam lasts a very long time. This is a great reason to use a Styrofoam box as a worm farm, rather than placing it in the trash.

What’s more is this hardy material is a great insulator and is therefore ideal if you want to keep your worms nice and warm during the colder months. Although you should still make sure your worms are warm enough during the winter, a Styrofoam box will make them a little cozier.

Using a tyre

If you happen to have a spare tyre hanging around the place, you may be interested to know it can be used as a worm farm. Tyres are ideal because they last long and can form a solid structure that your worms are sure to love.

A tyre sat on bricks and wood with holes drilled into the tyre so the liquid escapes is perfect. A small tub placed under the holes ensures the liquid fertilizer is caught. Place an old trash can lid or piece of wood on top of the tyre so it can be used as a lid.

Using a bin or a barrel

It’s incredibly easy to make a worm farm from an old bin or even a barrel. As with a farm made using a tyre, the bin or barrel need to be built on a raised platform so it can sit there quite nicely away from the ground. You should also ensure there are plenty of holes made so the liquid is able to escape.

Using wood

It’s very easy to get your hands on some unwanted wood, and you may know someone who wants to get rid of a pile. Worm farms can easily be built using wood, as it’s easy to construct a box shaped farm, just make sure you create a hinged lid, or one that can easily be lifted off.

Worm farms can be built out of wood, in box form, with a hinged or lift off lid. A number of gardeners owning a farm use wood to construct one.

Using a pathway

If you are lucky enough to have an old pathway you don’t use very often, you could potentially turn it into a worm farm. All that’s required is for you to place down some fruit and vegetables scraps, before adding the worms and covering them up with some sort of organic material. If there’s a chance someone may decide to use the pathway, you may want to place some unwanted pallets on top of the worms so they are not crushed when the pathway is used.

In order to maintain the pathway, you should dig up the compost and add it to your garden, doing this just twice a year will ensure the compost is lovely and rich. If you would like to place plants in the area where the worm farm is going to be, then planting seeds is ideal as the amazing fertilizer will do your plants wonders.

Creating a free range worm farm

The idea of creating a free range worm farm may seem somewhat bizarre, but it’s one that is definitely worthwhile. The idea is that you place any type of container you wish into your garden and allow your worms to come a go as they please.

This means your worm farm is completely free range as the worms will have the ability to travel as far as they want, and stay either in or out of the worm farm you have created for them.

If you want to create a free range worm farm for them, make sure you make enough drainage holes so the lovely fertilizer is able to drain out with ease.

When this is done, make sure you continuously place kitchen scraps into the buckets so your worms have plenty to eat.

Garden composting success

Once you have kept a worm farm for a few weeks, you will begin to see how good they are at breaking down your compost and making it fine a beautiful. It will then be perfect for putting on your garden. You may wish to dig your worms out now and again and place them in some more compost, but ideally you should leave them be and keep adding compost and using the liquid fertilizer on your garden.