Theres a worm at the bottom of the garden

Now I’m not suggesting you keep worms as pets, if it tickles your fancy you could I suppose but they aren’t the most entertaining or aesthetically pleasing bunch. What worms do is what they do best, eat, poo and breed, they do precious little else. The poo part is what you should be interested in, granted it could be viewed as an unhealthy obsession but worm castings are a superb garden fertilizer and it really helps to enrich and break up soil. When you eventually transfer your worm compost to the garden you also inevitably transfer a number of worms which go on to aerate and do more of the same in your garden as they did in the wormery. I was once told, by a venerable gardener, that a good rule of thumb to how good a soil is, is the number of worms in it.

What you do with a wormery is throw away your table scraps, veggie peelings, egg shells, paper towels and tissues, even a little bit of newspaper can go in the mix. It’s estimated that you can divert over 25% of your waste into a wormery or composter. Which would help the government to keep online for the targets it has been set by the EU for waste reduction, because the government are keen to meet this objective you can usually buy wormeries or composters at discounted rates through your local council. For instance Camden council offer wormeries for £10 which compared to the standard price of £30 is a pretty good deal, evidence that they are taking their commitment pretty seriously.

Wormeries are available commercially, the usually consist of a bin like container with a tap on the bottom, to drain away excess liquids, a vented tight seal lid on the top, to keep out unwanted flies and an insert to raise the worms out of the leachate (the excess liquid). But it’s pretty easy to make yourself a wormery. You can use wooden boxes or those stackable plastic jobs. Next you need worms, you can't use ordinary earthworms in a wormery, it’s too rich for them. The most common compost worms are Tiger Worms, Red Wrigglers and Indian Blues. You should be able to contact a wormery manufacturer for supplies.

Now, how to build a simple wormery
Select yourself a clean(ish) container that has drainage holes, fruit boxes work well and you should be able to pick them up for nothing at local stores or markets.

A home made wormery like this will leak leachate so it must be stored somewhere that will allow drainage, particularly if you need to add water to the mix.

Now you’ve set up your wormery (come on what have you been doing all this time, get on with it), you will want to know how it’s getting on. A good indicator of how well your wormery is doing is the size of the worms; not surprisingly nice fat worms are good. If your worms are not breeding (i.e. there are no little ones….) it’s an indication that there might be too many worms in your bin.