How to Make your Own Worm Farm

Worm farming is one of the best and simplest ways of advocating environmental consciousness through the process of recycling and how to make your worm farm just as easy as setting up your garden.

You can start building your worm farm using old styrofoam boxes, used tires, wooden crates, or similar types of boxes or crate containers.

You will also need to make sure the worm trays are kept moist -not too wet nor too dry, as long as it is damp and cool. Should it start drying up, just pour in water evenly until the compost bed absorbs enough water to stay moist.

Various kinds of worm farm containers are available at hardware stores and garden shops, you may need to check around for fair prices and good buys, should you need to acquire new ones and save yourself the hassle of modifying boxes to make into worm farms.

Worm farms must be kept away from direct contact with the ground to prevent pests from getting into the farm and there should also be a drainage tap or water collection area within the container in case it gets too wet, the liquid overflow can also be used as a liquid fertilizer.

You must use special composting worms that can be purchased from garden shops and hardware stores since ordinary earthworms are not ideal types for farming.

The ideal types of composting worms for your worm farms are Indian blues, red wriggles, or Tiger Worms.

You can start off with 1,500-2,000 worms to get your worm farm started.

Composting worms only eat organic matter, and thus are good composters, instead of the usual earthworms that you find in the garden, which are earthworks that aerate and burrow the soil and do not make them good composters.

The primary purpose of setting up a worm farm is not to mass produce worms or culture them, but to get the product that the worms produce when fed with organic material similar to that used in a compost pile.

This by-product is called castings and while it’s technically worm manure, it is a highly productive fertilizer or add-on for garden soil or potted plants.

The technical term for using worms to process compost and produce castings is ‘vermicomposting’, and the by-product is called vermicompost or vermicast.

To get high-quality castings from worm farms, it is necessary to use the proper type of worms.

Getting on all fours and digging the ground to look for worms is not exactly the way to go about it, since there are worms that are of the composting types.

These are worms that adapt well to living in a limited area or boxed container and those processing organic waste are the ones used for worm farms.

The wrong type of worm, especially the usual earthworms, tends to burrow down deep and is not suited to cramped spaces.

You may want to purchase your worms from an experienced vermicomposting supplier, as you go along, you may be able to identify your local worms and be able to establish whether or not they are good ones suited to your farm.

An easy structure would be to start the farm using a cubic container, be it a styrofoam box or wooden crate.

You begin by placing a couple of sheets of shredded newspaper or cardboard on the worm tray to serve as bedding, followed by a few handfuls of soil.

Moisten the bedding material lightly with water, and begin adding some organic waste for food, and then the worms.

Cover the top of the container with something that will keep out the light while retaining moisture, using materials such as burlap, shredded box board, or newspaper.

As much as possible, try and resist the urge to look at the worms for a couple of weeks, then take off the cover and add some more food.

Continue to do this process as the worms multiply and if the container starts to smell bad, you may be supplying the worms with excess food than they can process.

Be sure not to add any animal products or waste like spoiled meat, milk products, or oil-based matter, which can cause the smell or attract pests.

If you notice the bin is about half full, it’s a good time to harvest the castings.

There are several ways to do this.

Some just push everything to one side, being sure to pull out large non-decomposed food and then they add the new bedding, dirt, and food to the empty side and wait a couple of weeks for the worms to move over to the new side, leaving the vermicompost behind that can be removed and used in the garden.

So this is how to make your worm farm and by now you already know how to go about it.