Worm Farms & Compost Bins

The greener way to dispose of waste

By Jay Williams

With the world becoming more focused on sustainability and thinking 'green', what better way to take responsibility for your waste than to start a worm farm / compost bin. It's even a great way to get your kids involved.

A worm farm is natures most efficient way of breaking down  leftover kitchen scraps and turning them into a rich fertiliser for your garden. Given the right conditions, a worm farm can do this much faster than a conventional compost bin without worms.

On average, people who have a worm farm / compost bin have 90% less organic garbage that would normally go to landfill. Imagine, if every household in this country reduced 90% their organic garbage by 90% we would not have the landfill issues we now have.

Composting with worms can be done in a specially designed worm farm, in a compost bin or in a compost heap, given the right conditions. The main ingredients for successfully composting with worms are moisture, air, temperature, darkness and feed mix.

Some tips and guides for keeping a worm farm are:¹

• Keep dark and retain moisture by covering the mix with old carpet, hessian bags or newspapers. Choose a shady position for your farm to keep temperature between 15 and 30ºC.
• Keep mix evenly moist - you should be able to just squeeze a water drop out of a handful of feed.
• Feed a mixture of 'greens' and 'browns' (2:1 by volume)[Cut or tear them into small pieces first].
  
  • greens are fruit, vegetables and grass
  • browns are leaves, bark, sawdust, cardboard and paper.
• If your system allows, gently turn the top 10cm with a fork every 1 or 2 weeks.
• It is recommended for a small home worm farm that you start with around 1,200 - 1,500 worms of mixed size (250gm). The population should double in about 3 months if properly managed.
• Don't over feed your worms, they can eat no more than their own body weight in a day. So if you have 250gm of worms to start they can only eat 250gm of feed per day.
• Don't feed droppings from any animal that has been “wormed” in the last 30 days
• Don't feed citrus or onion waste if your system is small.

There are a variety of worm farms / compost bins you can purchase (usually from your local council) and are available in a range of sizes. There are also some companies that offer professionally installed Worm Farm Waste Systems for both domestic and commercial use.

Alternatively, you can chose to build your own using a couple of polystyrene boxes. Instructions for doing this can be found here.

Some worm facts:

• An earthworm breathes through its skin, has five hearts and a circulatory system, calciferous glands for neutralising food, a crop and a gizzard with stones for grinding food, a digestive system, a brain and nervous system, several hundred kidney type organs, both male and female organs and abilities, and a saddle which secretes mucus for egg capsules.
• Worm wee (tea) and poo (castings) are a superb source of fertiliser for your garden. Vegetables will taste better and flowers will flower earlier.
• Without the help of worms, plants and animals that died and fell to the ground would stay right where they fell. Trees, leaves, fruit, nuts, dead animals and food would just keep piling up.
• Worms have been around for 120 million years. In the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, Cleopatra considered worms as sacred.
• Worms are so finely coordinated that they can feel vibrations on the ground as a bird lands and will disappear down their burrows quickly enough to survive.

If you are interested in starting your own or would like more information we recommend contacting your local council

¹Information provided by Eltham Worms