How to Make a Worm Tower: by Morag Gamble

my name is Maura gamble on the permaculture teacher designer and writer with my family I live a simple debt-free life in a permaculture eco village in the Australian sub tropics my edible landscape is low-maintenance abundant and a great sense of joy we've built our own house and modular house which collects all its own water and power and processes its wastes in this series of films I'd like to show you around hi I'm Morgan I'm from a permaculture life this is my permaculture gardener today I wanted to show you our worm town you've got a whole lot of different worm towns all throughout the garden as well as a lot of different other compost systems but this one I love because it's just so simple and it's really a fantastic thing to add into a small garden a raised garden bed onto any vegetable bed that you're really wanting to keep the fertility up to it's as simple as sinking a pipe into the ground that underneath it has holes I'll show you that in a minute how to set one up sing that into the ground and then just feed it from the top so adding your food scraps your coffee ground your tea leaves ripped up paper tissues sorbents all of that just goes straight into here the worms come up in process it draw it down into the soil and all the castings and the liquid just goes directly into the soil it just couldn't be simpler inside here is the worm Tower so we have a newspaper covering the top of the the worms to keep them nice and and cool and also to add carbon into the mix underneath us we reach down look at that rich beautiful it's getting really nice well here we go starting to find them so they're working on processing that's actually coffee grounds turning deep dark black wonderful so I'll put that back in there the worms will add some more food into that one shortly I'm going to make a new one now so I'm about to install the worm Tower into this section garden a new piece of government really hasn't had much attention at all it was actually quite compacted site because it's where we did a lot of building from those concrete mix here and also it so I really want to try and build up the the soil fertility and openness of the soil here so installing your worm farm is a really great idea so right in the middle of this go I've dug a hole and this is probably the easiest type of worm town to build quite a nice dynamic ax a pipe and then we're going to bury it so that the holes will go underneath the soil so I just used a five millimeter drill to drill holes at regular intervals all the way around and so what this means is that the worms can go through this into the soil if they need to move out of this river gets too wet or it gets too rich or even to take the worm other worms can come in and take the materials out too so this is going to be buried into the soil right down to the bottom I'll put a little bit of a bedding mix of compost at the base and then put a really good solid mix good handful of composting worms and you really do need the composting worms the red worms are tiger worms or the blue worms both worms will eventually come and take this em that will break down much more quickly if you add in the compost worms too and then they'll be working together so I'm just going to put this into my hole here make sure that the holes are actually going to be below the level of the soil so I might just take a little bit out just to make sure it's right down nice and it yeah just press that me make sure it's nice and level and then just backfill and you don't want to compress it too much otherwise or compacted too much otherwise the worms won't be able to move through very easily being a march all the way back around to really want this to be as cool as possible for the worms so that there was a nice hot day the worms day nice and calling there but a little bit lower out okay that's nice and firm so I have some compost teas and almost finished compost I'm going to put down as the base as the bedding for the worms they'll be really happy in that just to get them start nice big handful of compost worms to toss into the mix and they go next to their castings in thank you be more complex just to help get going and the final thing always in any of their mixes is to put a handful of mulch in on the top up nice at worms and to put anything on top always put the hay on top because it helps to prevent the Flies from coming in and also helps to keep a nice stable temperature so the last thing for this is to put a pot on top to stop other animals from getting in and also to protect their worms from having too much rain coming in and that's it bring the mulch around it and I'll come and check them in about a week and maybe give them some more food so as I mentioned before we have lots of different worm farms in our system from worm towers to worm farms what we're building here now is a is a larger-scale worm farm we collected this beautiful double sink the local tip and we've got some old bits of building material from around our house and putting it together so we can really multiply our worm population to be able to spread them further out through the garden and also to support donkeys and boomtown enterprise that he's I'm starting eight-year-old huge um so I got alejandro here from colombia he's whooping in our house and he's constructing it well tell us a bit about what you're doing yeah basically we just have the double sink and we're making with this piece of wood like the frame and then some legs to make it high enough but we've in key to work like a real 1920 meters tall yeah we just have missing they finish the legs and put the lip finish covering it that's it so I've been wanting to make one of these for a really long time I also have a bathtub that's waiting to be made into something similar so I'm imagining a whole series of sinks and bathtubs and once we've been made it out of an old fridge so it really depends on what kind of resources you have available so next time come back to our permaculture life channel and we'll see this one in action come back to learn more about my permaculture lifestyle home garden and community I'll also be visiting really interesting people and places find out more stories and information about my courses and workshops on my blog our permaculture live blog spot.com

Channel: Morag Gamble : Our Permaculture Life

Views: 144,717

Keywords: worm tower, permaculture, gardening, wormfarming, simple life, ecovillage, Crystal Waters, worm tower composting, worm towers in the garden, worm tower diy, worm tower in rised bed, worm towers in teh garden, worm tower pvc pipe, worm tower 5 gallon bucket, worm tower in raised bed, Worms in garden, worm farming diy, gardening at home, simple life hacks

Id: ee3X8Sph0UE

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2016