Worm Farm

I think every household should have a worm farm. I've owned mine now for more than twelve months and it has been one of the best investments I have made for three main reasons: 1) worm farms produce worm castings, one of the richest fertilizers you can get for your garden, 2) it also produces 'worm tea', a liquid concentrate you can dilute in water to fertilize your garden and 3) all it takes to make this wonderful stuff is food scraps from the kitchen.

For those of you who have not seen one before, here is a photo of mine.

Its a simple design.  There are three boxes that stack on top of each other.  The bottom box is where the worms live; the boxes on top are where the food scraps go.  The boxes have small holes in the bottom, so once one is filled with food scraps, you can place the next one on top - those hard working worms just love to eat through to the surface!  The tap at the bottom is where you drain the worm tea from.

As the worm farm was full of castings, I thought it was a great opportunity to give a boost to the small vegetables and fruit trees I planted at the farm this year.

I collected the castings and roughly calculated I had just enough to spread around the citrus trees and the vegetable bed.

I moved the grass clippings of mulch back and spread the castings around the base.

I collected so much worm tea that I poured it over the castings 'neat' without diluting it in water this time.  Because it is an organic fertilizer, there is no risk of 'burning' plants - a result that can occur with chemical based fertilizers as they inject excessive amounts of nitrogen into the soil.

I then repeated the same process in the vegetable garden too.

I have seen the amazing results a worm farm can bring to the garden, although this is the first time I have applied it to growing produce on the farm - fingers crossed I get a great outcome.

As for the worm ... I can only be amazed at what this humble little creature provides the world and appreciate how important their function is in the ecosystem.  It is my hope that one day billions upon billions of worms will call the earth beneath my farm home and thrive within its soils.