Worm Mansion

This is a purely garden related post so now's the time to tune out if that's not your style.

Here in NZ you can buy a good basic worm farm from The Warehouse or other similar places.  It has three boxes with screen dividers in between.  The bottom box is where the worm pee or run off from the castings is collected.  The middle box is where the maturing castings are and the top box is the one you are filling.

The top box - room for more!

The idea is to fill the top box until it's crammed, then take it off, open up and empty the middle box and use all the castings, then put the top box in the middle to mature and the empty middle box becomes the top box that you begin to fill again (got that?!).  You can add more boxes to the cycle if you fill them quickly.

The middle box - filled with beautiful, rich castings.

The problem is the bottom box.  To get to the worm pee you have to lift two heavy boxes off, scoop out the pee and then put the whole thing back together.  A bit too much bother to do regularly.

My good friend Sue is moving back to the UK from whence she came a good while back.  I'll miss her terribly (but I'm looking on the bright side - I'll have someone to visit!).  They've been downsizing and having a clear out and I've already benefited, but this worm farm set up is one of the best things yet!

Sue's handy husband has plugged in a simple hose fitting set up to drain the worm pee.  Whenever the watering can is half full, it can be topped up with water to dilute it and used to water plants and give them a boost.  This eliminates the frequent heavy lifting.  The worm farm needed a stand to accommodate the hose, but this could be adapted from an old table or bench.

Two farms is the perfect amount of room for our family.  The chickens get bread scraps, cabbage, apple cores etc and the worms get the stuff they won't eat, like citrus, teabags, bits of paper and potato and banana peels.  And I get the worm castings to spread in my garden the the worm pee to use in my pots or on anything that needs a boost!

Official worm farm guides suggest that worms don't like citrus, but mine don't seem to mind a bit.  Plus I sprinkle a bit of lime in from time to time as worms prefer less acid conditions.

So if you've been contemplating a worm farm, this might give you some ideas on how to set one up effectively, or if you've got one and it's been annoying you, get down to your local hardware and buy a few hose connectors.  You're plants will love you for it.

Mini Gardening

I'm soooo looking forward to having space to garden in a productive manner, but in the meantime I thought I'd show how I keep my thumb tinged green.

We live on an acre section. Sounds huge, huh? Plenty of room for gardening, so what am I whinging about? Well, it's an acre of land that sits at about a 45 degree angle! And it is 80% covered in regenerating native bush. The only real flat bit is the driveway! The soil is solid clay too, so backbreaking stuff.

But I have a huge deck. So pots it is. Lots of pots. Oh, and a bath. No space for a bath inside, so lets make use of it somewhere else!

It took about two sacks of potting mix and one of compost for the bath and if I was doing it again, I'd put in another sack just to get a bit more depth.

They do take a bit of watering in summer, but I empty the kids paddling pool into the pots as one method of saving water. Then I put a plastic basin in the bottom of my kitchen sink and it collects vege washing water, dish rinsings, hand washings and cloth washouts. Before you know it, you've collected 15 litres a day!

I grew green beans in the bath in summer. I hung strings from the shade sail rafters and had three plants at either end and lettuces in the middle. The photo of the kids is just one days collection of beans. I was AMAZED at how many beans I grew. (Actually I was amazed at how many beans I grew with the lack of attention I gave them!).

And what keeps my garden growing? Certainly no silver bells and cockle shells. Nope, just good old excrement, otherwise known as vermicast, or as my kids call it, worm poo!!

My worm farm gets vege scraps that the chickens won't eat. And that's enough to keep them ticking over and giving me a container load of vermicast every six months and a couple of buckets of worm wee too.

I dilute the liquid with water till it looks like tea and give them that every week or so and then when I pull out plants I mix in vermicast before I plant new ones.

For nitrogen loving plants sometimes I'll go scrape up some chook poo from under their night perch and mix that in too.

And there you have it. Mini gardening. It certainly doesn't give me enough to not need to buy veges, but it does give us some. And it keeps my enthusiasm up. Great for the kids to help with too. They love the harvesting bit - especially cherry tomatoes and blueberries!