HOW TO MAKE A WORM FARM - Converting an old bathtub into a worm paradise

[Music] yes [Music] g'day and welcome back to another episode of the weedy garden welcome to wormville on this episode i'm going to show how i built wormville my worm farm so what am i doing wearing the lawn well i'm collecting worm food see fresh grass clippings is a great worm food and so let me show you what else i needed this is what i used to build wormville first i had to buy four star picket fence posts these will be my four corner legs then i have some dried leaves from the bush which i ran over with the lawnmower to chop them up a bit otherwise it's a bit of a mouthful for those little worms some cardboard pizza boxes you can also use newspaper in australia for the last 15 years all the newsprint's been made from uh plant-based ink so the worms can eat that some cocoa peat seed husks when the birds are finished eating all the husks are left i use them dried grass clippings [Music] cow manure this is fresh from the cow give or take a day or two [Music] onions now onions need to be de-gassed in the sun for a few hours if you chop them up and let them sit in the sun they don't smell so bad and the worms will love them [Music] green grass clippings these are of course different from the brown grass clippings these are fresh some comfrey comfrey is full of trace minerals i've got my kitchen waste some star fruit that have fallen from the ground use coffee grounds from the cafe down the road and of course we need a big apartment building for them all that's the old bathtub a bit of chicken wire wrapped in a bit of shea cloth with a rock on the top to use as a filter over the drain pipe this is where all my worm juice will come out a few coffee bags or hessian bags to keep them moist and cozy in the summertime oh and i have some eggshells for a bit of calcium i've got a bucket full of compost worms that i've picked up from a mate [Music] and here this is by our char or charcoal from burnt wood this is really good for the microbes they live in all the little tiny crevices in the biochar see you know if you take one gram of biochar and take all the little crevices and fold them out flat that would have the surface area of a tennis court so a grammar biochar is home to trillions of microorganisms so that's all i need to get started [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] level [Music] [Music] that's a nice height for me that's a nice height for me it's pretty high but i'm a pretty high guy i might just put some wire on that and strengthen those so they don't uh so they're more stable okay okay so the first thing we need to do once we've got our bathtub up here the next thing we've got to do is we're going to make a filter so i'm just going to get some chicken chicken wire and a bit of shade cloth and i'll wrap that up like that and i'll just put the stone on there that's our filter okay so we want to fill the bath about oh about halfway with this beautiful fresh cow manure horse manure you can also use sheep manure if you're going to use chicken manure you need to let that sit in compost for a while um because it's too strong okay okay so now we just layer the different layers on so i'll start off with some dry grass i think [Music] so i don't put straw or sugar cane mulch in with with my worms because although they like to live in it they don't like to eat it [Music] now we'll put some greens in oh put some coffee just go to your local starbucks to get the coffee or your local cafe that's what i do let's go down the road and say can you keep your coffee grinder and go down once a week and and get a whole bucket full of it okay and then next next layer some star fruit from down at a tree down the house rotting star fruit with a cardboard fine if you've got it shredded it's better but i don't want to use too much time chopping it up it'll it'll it'll decompose fine i'll get into it okay a bit of green now i'll put some comfrey on you've got to make it in layers like a spinach lasagna um and that'll keep the airflow needs to be aerobic so your lasagna needs to be two times brown for one time green all right so two parts brown for one part green got some cocoa cocoa pea [Music] some gonna put some biochar in here now [Music] okay so we've got onions here onions worms don't like fresh onions because they smell too strong they're too potent so what you've got to do with your onions you've got to chop them up and just put them out in the sun for a couple hours as long as it's two to four degrees so if you're living in a freezing climate then it has to be at least two to four degrees during the day and put them in the sun and just let it dry out for a couple hours which two two to four hours and it kind of degasses the fumes from it so then the worms like it and it doesn't smell so [Music] so when you're doing emptying your compost you can just put your um just put your onions just besides leave them in the sun for a while before you put them on [Music] a bit of kitchen waste and um so oh those poor old cucumbers that didn't last some cucumbers [Music] i'll get into that pretty quickly it's nice see this is the moisture this is the this is the liquid that comes out and also citrus worms they don't mind citrus you can put citrus in the worm farm it's okay but um just don't like fill it up with citrus they don't like too much citrus um if you don't want to put it in you can also dry it out in the sun dry these out in the sun and then you can use them for fire lighters they're really good fire liners because of the oil in in the skin so that'll be okay we feed the birds at our place as well so when they're finished eating they um they leave all the um these husks behind see so that's like sunflower husks the wheat husks so i'll chuck them in the worms they actually eat their own weight in food every day so if you've got a kilo of worms they'll eat a kilo of food every day so just got green grass clippings this is just the leaves that i've run over with the lawn mower and now i've got some egg shells [Applause] [Music] that smells a bit okay that's pretty good now [Music] i'm just going to give that a little bit of a water because it's quite dry on top just a little bit of a water just to moisten up those dead leaves okay yeah it's about four liters okay so now it's time for the worms there we go here's the worms see there's the worms oh i might have piled a bit too much in see see their worms there are many types of compost worms but mine are mostly tiger worms and they'll um they'll double in population probably about every 40 days [Music] this is the old bag i'll just put the old bag over them here and then i put the new bags that i've wet i think i put them sideways and that's some better sideways i'm going to just make sure i keep this moist now so it doesn't dry out too much it shouldn't dry out because there's lots of moisture in there finish right to go one worm thumb i'll just get my bucket so i can catch the worm wing i think i'll put a lid on that and cover it up with a pipe and a cover so the flies don't get in and and the mosquitoes you don't want the flies getting into this so we put this on so when i put all these ingredients in and put the bag on top like i did on the last frame what happened was that all the different composting materials they became too hot so so what happens when it gets too hot is that the worms don't like that um they like to live in about 37 degrees so if it's 50 degrees in the middle and it's 15 degrees on the outside somewhere there's a sweet spot that sweet spot of 37 degrees so they were living in that area until i turned it around a couple of times and got the heat out of it i took the bags off it went into the bags off it the mice came in through my net mouses so that was no good so um i had to make another cover for it so i made a um cover out a bit of wood and i've got a bit of rat net a bit of mice net on one side and a bit of flying head on the other side and i just put that on top now and that looks that's really good but if you want to look at the worms i just take a handful in here they're everywhere see see beautiful compost worms and you know compost worms they live in about the first four to six inches of soil in your ground and they eat all the dead organic material right they love pumpkin by the way and so but the earthworms they live about two to four meters down and they live from the um they live off the bacteria from the compost worms so the compost worms gut if you think about the most concentrated place on earth of beneficial bacteria that is inside the compost worm gut right and so the earthworm that comes up from underneath the soil like a whale a whale that sort of eats krill right and totally ties it's more krill but the earthworm comes up like a whale through that through the soil and it eats the bacteria in the compost worms manure and everything else that's rotting and all the other microbes that are pouring and dying and stuff it eats the bacteria the earthworms you don't need to wart your your worm farm maybe a little bit in the beginning with your dry materials but otherwise the worms will make their own all this juice stuff comes through the worms and becomes the oranges [Music] step one completed [Music] so just get a little fire going first i'll get the billy i'll put it on there i think make myself a cup of tea by burning the end of this you're making a layer of charcoal and uh when you've got a layer of charcoal when you put it underneath the ground it stops the rotting of the pit of the pole so you can leave the pole in the ground from for a lot longer time that's what they used to do in the old days i think i'm going to go and dig the hole while this is burning [Music] at least at least this way i'm getting some good practice in for digging my holes for the trees i think the billy's boiling out that's hot it was a bad idea [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so the reason i've got the roof on here is um for two reasons one is to keep the rain out you want to keep the rain out of it because the worm juice is actually all the juice from all the food and all the grass and all the stuff that the worms are eating okay it's not the rain that's fallen on the worm farm and drain through all the all the bacteria and all the goodness that's not the worm juice the worm juice is actually the juice of the stuff that goes through the worm so the roof is to keep the rain out but also to keep the sun off in the summertime right here it's in the winter shade because the sun comes up here and goes down there so it's in the shade all day long but in the summertime we want it to be in the shade so we got the roof on for the shade as well i'm just starting to use the juice now you can use the juice already it's not very strong see so we'll get about one liter of this and pour it into our nine liter watering can okay and then we'll fill all the rest up with water and we'll give it a shot see if it works [Music] so after about three months this bathtub is gonna have a lot of worm castings in it okay and worm castings is really good for the garden so how do we harvest those so what we do by this time they've probably eaten down a lot of the food okay so they're eating the new food that you put in so what you want to do is you want to gather all your food like just imagine you want to put all your food at one end and then you get your bag and you make sure it's wet and you put your bag over the end and then you take the roof off fold it back take it off and then the sun will come in here and they'll all move up the end here and they'll start living up here underneath the food and where it's nice and sheltered right and after about three days all of them have moved up then you get your shovel and put all the worms in your wheelbarrow and then you can empty out your bathtub with all your worm castings then you can start all over again [Music] day by day year by year you have an ongoing supply of organic fertilizer microbe rich nutrient rich which gives your plants power so when you eat them you'll have power too so i hope you enjoyed the video i hope you learned something if you have any questions or anything to add please don't hesitate to put it in the comments maybe i'll make a worm video number two okay beautiful healthy happy plants have a nice day and i'll catch you later [Music]

Channel: The Weedy Garden

Views: 683,292

Keywords: permaculture, organic gardening, how to garden, growing your own food, sustainable living, off the grid, grow food, gardening, gardening tips, sustainability, vegetable garden, covid garden, lockdown garden, covid project, lockdown project, worm farm, vermiculture, how to build a worm farm, how to make a worm farm, home made fertiliser, worm farming

Id: bgwNmdV2KNs

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021