Nearly June and things are hotting up!

Well, I split the wormery up a couple of months ago - I meant to post about it, but the house renovations took over again!  :)

Anyway, I already had a 3-tier wormery from a different supplier than my main one - I had not kept it well and allowed it to fail, prompting the decision to start again and set up this blog - I'd cleaned it out and let it 'naturalise' for quite a while, and with the worms now doing well I felt it was time to start it again.

I took about half of the matter & worms from the main wormery and transferred it over to the other, spread it gently across the surface, covered it with soggy egg box bits and then soggy phone book pages (yes, they still have their uses!) and left it alone for several weeks.
It has a slightly smaller footprint and a different sump design, as well as a different lid design, and I thought it would be interesting to see how it fared compared with the main one.

Here we are a couple of months later and both wormeries are really hotting up!  I've been feeding every 2-3 weeks, no more than the contents of a 2litre ice cream tub full of kitchen waste per wormery each time - about half that to start with when it was colder.

I keep all my eggshells and dry them out in the oven whenever I do a roast or some baking, then grind them up in a pestle & mortar.  I add a couple of handfuls of this grit to the feed very so often (not every time), and will also add some shredded paper (I shred all my junk mail and sensitive documents) if I think it's getting a bit wet.  I then either put more soggy egg box bits over the top if the old ones are getting too mushy / eaten, or just replace the original ones, then put the soggy paper back over the top.

There are masses of new worms (despite many of them trying for careers as endurance swimmers in the sump) and plenty of eggs, and the compost / castings looks fabulous. 

I'm now at the point where I'll add a second tray to each wormery on the next feed.

What I have noticed with the two styles is that the smaller one seems to allow much more ingress of rainwater, and because of this I have to ensure that the sump is drained more regularly as otherwise it fills up very quickly and threatens to drown all the worms.

Am looking forward to using the worm tea on my tomatoes at the allotment this year!  I'm thinking (as I have, as usual, far too many plants) that I will feed half with worm tea, and leave half with just water, and see what the results are.

Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be able to start separating out the compost from the bottom trays and will be able to use it for my seedlings!

winter slow-worms

It's been about 3 months since I last updated this - things have been somewhat hectic at the house, and rather slow in the wormery!

The renovations at the house have had priority so I haven't really paid a lot of attention to the wormery but thankfully as it's winter it really hasn't needed attention and has probably benfitted from my leaving it alone.

Knowing that there was a cold snap coming up, I wrapped the wormery in bubble wrap and made sure that there was plenty of insulating egg box type material on top of the waste.  This was probably left alone for a good 6 to 8 weeks before checking it again after all the snow and cold weather here had passed.

The worms had surviced the weather fine, and seemed to be wriggling around quite happily in the nice compost, so another 2litre tub full of kitchen waste was added to the top, the insulation put back on and the wormery wrapped up again, just in case.

I checked the wormery again about 4 weeks later and the waste has not reduced much - the cold weather is still keeping the worms quite sluggish so I'm not worried and will check again in a couple of weeks to see how they are doing.  All I've added lately is more shredded paper insulation and some crushed egg shell.

On the next check I'll aerate the compost and check the worm count (not individually, just a quick check by eye of whether there are any dead ones or more little ones around).

Another couple of months of cool weather to come so I probably won't need to feed them more often than about once a month.