worm layering

I like my worm farm, but I'm finding it hard to get the rewards out of it I should.  It's easy enough to pour water on it to drain out the worm wee.  But getting out the casing is a pain in the bum because, well, it's full of worms!  Compost worms are a bit touchy and won't necessarily survive in the garden, so I want to keep them in the bin.  Commercially-made worm farms come with layers but my worm farm was free, just two broccoli boxes from a shop.

I got some great advice from the OzGrow garden forum, where I get all kinds of advice.  First, peel back the newspaper covering and pull off any large chunky food (in this case, some rocket).

Next, put on a layer of hessian sack.  New worm food goes on top of this.  Newspaper layer goes over that and of course the lid over that.

The worms will migrate through the hessian to eat the food above.  After a few weeks, I'll use the hessian to pull the whole layer of worms and scraps off, and below that should be a layer of worm casings.  Hopefully with fewer worms in it!

worm poo power

I decided to harvest out my first lot of worm castings from the worm farm.  They've been fattening up on newspaper shreddings and lots of fruit - my worms are picky, they don't seem to care for veggies and prefer fruit.  Here's my first pile of castings.  It's hard to avoid picking out some worms when you dig the castings out of the worm farm so I borrowed this technique.  You make a pile of the castings and the worms instinctively go to the center where it's darkest.  Then you pull away the outer layers of castings a few times, giving them time to run away in between, until you're left with a little pile of mostly worms, which you put back in the farm to keep fattening up. 

The castings are wonderfully rich, like very soft clay, and no they don't smell like poo they just smell like dirt.  It's a pure, super-injection of moisture-retaining organic life.  You can put it as-is into the ground when you plant things, or it dissolves really easily in water into a kind of slurry, which is good for rejuvenating tired potting mix.  Some of my beds are a thin layer of good soil over a dense layer of inorganic builder's rubble, which makes it hard to enrich the deeper layers without disturbing plant roots.  But this liquid slurry should be able to seep down into the poor soil and help bring it to life.  I'm looking forward to seeing how worm poo power improves my garden!

roasty toasty and rescuing worms

Yesterday was our first 40+ day of the year: 43.6C (that's 110F).  Last night it dipped down to a low of 30.6, the equal hottest night in recorded history, tied with a night in 1902.  Today was still in the 30s until about 3pm.  Fun times in the age of global warming!

I managed it better than last year's heat, though last year we had three 40+ days in a row, another record.  I made sure everything was well-watered beforehand, including the geraniums and some of the younger shrubs and the Japanese maple.  The tomatoes have a shade cloth shield this year which helped enormously.  The multi-graft citrus took a bit of sunburn because unfortunately, it's in the middle of a flush of new growth.

The close scare was the worm farm.  The day before the heat I soaked some newspaper and put it in the freezer, then put it into the worm farm in the morning.  This morning I went to check on them and got a real surprise when I opened the lid.  It was like and exodus of worms desperately trying to crawl out the lid, but too scared of the light outside.  They were obviously not happy.  I got all the ice in the house, wrapped it in newspaper and put it in the worm farm.  I also hosed it down with some cold water and hoped for the best.

This afternoon I checked on them again and the ice obviously helped, they were no longer trying to climb out the top.  Next time there's a hot day coming I'm going to freeze a few plastic bags full of water and use those.

I watered the box down again and as I listened to the water trickle into the lower box I thought I should check on the worm wee box.  I'm glad I did, because it turns out they were trying to escape through the bottom too!  So I filled half a bucket with my first harvest of coffee-black worm wee ... straining it through shade cloth of course and rescuing a golfball-sized clump of worms in the meantime.  I didn't take any photos of the worms, partially because I was too busy trying to rescue them and partially because they're not pretty to look at.  But I did take this photo of my first worm wee harvest, the January 2009 vintage Petit Chateau.

Watered down, it's meant to be a great liquid fertilizer.  I'm looking forward to trying it out and seeing how my plants like it.

growing, harvests, planting and worms

A lot to but together for this post.  First I wanted to share how much my tomatoes are thriving this year now that they're in a huge planter.  They're another 20cm taller since I took this photo, with heaps of little green fruit.  I've had to brace them against the wind though, it can get very strong.

I finally pulled up my Granex sweet onions to make room for the pumpkin and melons.  I put my foot in the photo for perspective - three good-sized onions and three that were too small.  They all could have done with another month of growth but I just couldn't put off the melons any longer, they'd been in little punnets for too long.  And unfortunately the onions were nothing special.  They were indeed very mild but they weren't very sweet.  Not something I'll repeat in this small garden.

But at least I was finally able to plant out two melons and a pumpkin.  I topped up the garden bed with mushroom compost, manure and my home-made compost.

I had heaps of compost this time around, rich and black.  It's going to make those melons grow like crazy!  Look at that beautiful black gold!

And finally, I decided this weekend to set up a worm farm.  The farm was free, made from two foam broccoli boxes.  Wet shredded newspaper goes in the top for worm food.  I poked holes in the bottom so the worm "juice" can drip through to the bottom box.  This "worm wee" makes excellent liquid fertiliser.

Then I just had to add worms!  You can buy the special composting worms from most garden shops.  You can't see them in the photo because they run away from the light, but I gave them a bit of watermelon rind to start with.  Mostly I got them to use up our newspaper which otherwise goes into the recycling,  but I'll sometimes add some food scraps.

As well as the "wee" they also make solid castings, rich pellets of clay-textured goodness.  So now I've got the compost bin to add texture to the soil, worm wee for liquid goodness and worm castings for fertiliser pellets.  As my husband put it, there isn't a corner left in the garden that hasn't been put to some purpose!