Building a Stackable DIY Worm Farm for $30 🐛

what's up everyone Kevin from epic gardening here don't win make the in my little worm bin here and as you can see they are looking quite happy I'm gonna show you them close up but today we're gonna give them a new home there's a lot to be said about keeping worms in general but a one tote system it's a little weak sauce we're gonna upgrade it to a three tote system which is going to mitigate and solve all the problems that a one tote system would have and it's way cheaper than buying a fancy system from a retailer alright let's go ahead and give these worms a new home okay before we build them their new motel or hotel or condo whatever you want to call it we've got to take a look at what's going on so we've got some eggshells in there you've got some salad greens and here's a mixture of their bedding with also some of their worm castings we can see there's a healthy healthy healthy amount of worms in here and these are some of the younger ones because they are reproducing worms are self-regulating they will you know make as many new worms as can sort of survive in the system that they're in but the problem with this is it's gonna it's gonna build up there's me a lot of worm castings in here and then the liquid at the bottom is going to start to compound as well which is going to kind of suffocate the worms out so we need to give them a new home and let's go ahead and run over exactly how that new home works now so we have our three toads here this is the foundation of the worm condo the worm high-rise but how does it work well first of all let's talk about materials this is really all you need you need one lid you need three roughneck totes I like the Roughnecks because they're just more durable so they're gonna probably eight to ten dollars per tote you're looking at maybe 24 30 bucks here lids come with it so I have two extra lids out there that I'm calling use for something else you'll need something to hold this up and we'll get to why once we talk about this this is a cooler drainer right this is something that you put on the bottom of a cooler to get all that ice water out from all the beer you had last weekend right that's what you need and the reason why is because the bottom tote here is our drainage tote so we're going to put something we're going to put this little drainage thing right here and boom now we have our worm juice drainage we don't ever have to stack the totes and like dump the warm juice out and do all that nonsense that's done for us now the second tote here in the third toe let's talk about what we do with those because the exact same process is gonna happen and I'll talk about why right now so on the bottom just take these out real quick give it a nice little shake on the bottom come on come on a little bit of a tight squeeze okay so on the bottom here you're drilling quarter inch holes on two inch centers and you're filling the entire bottom and why you're doing that is because you need the worms to be able to crawl up it and you need the castings and the juice to fall down right and you're going to do the same thing with the other tote and then the other thing you'll do is you'll drill quarter inch holes along the top here all the way around the top and you're doing that because worms need air so you need to do some aeration for them right let's put this back let's talk about how it would work in practice the lid goes straight on the top you don't need to drill any holes in the lid because you drilled holes right here and right here for the aeration right so how would it work in practice how would we transfer the worm so you saw earlier in the video into this system and make it work well it's pretty easy pop the lid open dump all the worms in here and then once this top tote fills up we will take it and we will put it in the middle and then this middle tote which will now be on the top will be empty we'll put bedding we will put food scraps in here and the worms are going to crawl up through those quarter inch holes because they're gonna run out of food in the tote that's full so they're gonna crawl upwards and they'll make their way into the top tote thus making this completely empty no worms at all just beautiful organic worm castings and then in the top once that fills up you just dump this one into the garden somewhere because you've got worm castings and then you just repeat the process over and over and over again and any time the bottom gets full boom you just pop the bottom of this you have free warm juice that you can dilute and use in your garden as well you can use it as a foliar spray there's a lot of stuff you can do with that so let's go ahead and actually build our Hotel you so for the cooler drain you've got the drain side here the attach side right here and what I'm gonna do is just make sure that this paddle bit will fit pretty well and then we will go ahead and do it now the thing to realize is you want to put it on the recessed section here so this is raised but when you flip it over it's going to be recessed right it's going to be lower and that's because there is a little bit of a lip here there's a little bit of a height thing here going on and so I want that to be as low as possible so we don't have you know if it if it basically is this much of height it won't drain until it reaches over that obviously so I'm going to put it on the lower section right here let's go ahead and drill this in and then we can attach it on the other side all right we'll pop it in right here throw this down and screw it on so that's nice and tight could it be a little bit more efficient little more effective if you used one that wasn't so raised up for sure but I don't think it's that big of a deal so let's go ahead and assemble this thing so our bottom tote is here our second tote in our third tote are gonna stack on top of each other and sit just like that and then remember we're putting the existing worms into the top tote so let me take this here what our wormies into their new home no worms overboard that's alright we'll scoop them up we'll get them in there alright we're good to go guys well that's it everyone it's pretty simple our worms are now existing in the top bin here middle bins empty this one is our worm juice collector and we've got our little we've got a little cooler drainer down here now one thing I would mention is the one thing I might change here is I would get a better draining thing so what I did is I just picked up the cooler Draenor because I was short on time at the hardware store I would try to get something that's a little more flush on the inside because that lip is gonna prevent at least a decent amount of the worm juice from draining out so you still might have to tip it a little bit which kind of defeats the purpose of it but that's a minor issue you can just make that change yourself and I'm raising it up on some bricks here or some two by fours whatever you want is completely fine now we'll get into future videos on how to actually care for your worms over the long term this was just a solution that I wanted to put up for how to actually make a more long-term sustainable system and I'd really encourage you guys if you want to see variants on this system my friend Steve and over at nature's always right has a system that's pretty ingenious for larger scale production something like he's doing on his market garden that he has a sort of flow tray that will catch all of the worm juice from multiple bins that are horizontally laid out instead of vertically laid out that's pretty cool system as well there's a million different ways to do this worms are relatively simple creatures to take care of but they do a lot for our garden so figured I do a little something for them upgrade them into the old worm condo high-rise better home than I have I'm only on two storeys these worms are on three alright guys until next time let me don't you think about this design in the comments if you have any improvements you might make happy and would love to hear them always experimenting here learning just alongside you you'll see me use these two liter bottles right here in a later video and I encourage you to subscribe like feel free to check the show more click show more down below check out some of the other things I've got going on in the epic gardening world we've got a podcast you know we've got a thriving Instagram community we got a Facebook group where people are sharing their gardening stories and their gardening problems all the time check those out and until next time guys good luck in the garden keep growing give your warms a new home alright I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 580,599

Rating: 4.8570647 out of 5

Keywords: epic gardening, urban farming, urban gardening, diy worm bin, diy stackable worm bin, stackable worm bin, worm bin, worm farm, worm castings, composting worms, composting with worms, worm composting, worm bin diy, rubbermaid worm bin, stackable worm bin instructions, stackable worm bin diy, worm bin construction, worm bin harvesting, worm bins, worm bin designs, worm, worm farming for beginners

Id: UaajjQ0FhM4

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 22 2018