Worms are man’s best friends especially if you are a home gardener and avid environmentalist.  With just a few home-scale worm farms and knowledge about vermicomposting, you can make a difference in your garden and for the environment.

Setting Up Your Worm Farms

Worm farms can be bought in many shops, both online and offline, even in hardware stores.  You will spend $50-65 for a ready-made worm farm with its initial batch of worms.  Take note that the earthworm species used are not your garden variety types.  Instead, red wigglers and European nightcrawlers are preferred.

If you want to make a worm farm, you can use a variety of materials like old plastic containers and old wood.  Just drill holes into the container’s bottom for aeration and drainage.  Or better yet, build your worm farms into the ground.  Place a pan to catch leachate runoff and spacers to separate the catchment pan and the tub.

Start by layering small pebbles at the bottom, adding an inch of damp newspapers (use the black and white portions only) and placing handfuls of garden soil (don’t use potting soil) and some eggshells.  Don’t pack it down.  You can then add your worms into the bedding.  Just make sure to feed them food before placing the worm bin in the dark.  If you do decide to keep your worm farm outside, make sure that you place it away from direct sunlight so as to encourage worm growth.

Maintaining Your Worm Farms

Fortunately, worms are very easy to take care of.  They will eat almost any biodegradable waste like paper and cartons, coffee grounds, vegetable and fruit peels, eggshells and breads, even leaves and grass.  You must never feed the worms highly acidic fruits and vegetables (think pineapples, citrus and onions) and pesticide-sprayed grass clipping in large quantities.

Add more food as necessary only since overfeeding them will result in odor problems.  Plus, it helps to bury their food inside a damp newspaper to prevent harmful mold from growing alongside your worm friends.  Also, pay attention to the bedding.  If it is too wet, you can either add dry bedding, drain off the water or leave it open for a few days.  If it becomes too dry, add water and loosely cover the farm.

Pests like rodents and flies can be avoided by not adding dairy products to the food menu and by adequately covering the vegetable matter with bedding.  It also helps to keep the worm farm at relatively stable temperatures of 59-77 degrees Fahrenheit.  When the bedding becomes unidentifiable, you can then harvest the castings for fertilizer use.  Or you can harvest the worms to make more worm farms!  And you start the eco-friendly, cost-friendly and plant-friendly process all over again.

Using Your Vermicompost

The resulting vermicompost can be used in two ways.  First, you can mix it in directly into the soil to promote plant growth and replenish soil nutrients.  Second, you can make it into a worm tea by steeping warm castings in water for a few hours or days, which can then be used as fertilizer and natural prevention method against plant diseases.

For just a very small fraction of the cost for commercial fertilizers, you can have worm farms and vermicompost that will save money, save the environment and save your garden!