Turning A Wicking Bed Into A Worm Farm, Nothing Else Like It

hello Bob Paul here with a wholesome farm video and I have to tell you this is probably the most important video I've made to date and I would ask a special favor please please share this with everybody you can every gardener at least you can email at Facebook Twitter Pinterest whatever this is importantly this I want to show you today a revolutionary way of growing the worm farm or having a worm farm so that you can have worm castings for your garden this is nothing like what you've seen before we've been doing this for a year and a half and have had tremendous success and now it's time to show what we can do and I'm telling you this is a game-changer please please consider sharing this video with everybody you know especially those who garden because this is that important we'd love to see this video go viral but take all the mess all the work out of worm farming make it so easy three three four year old can do it so please watch the video what we're gonna do is if you've seen some of my wicking bed videos and I'll put one here we've we've converted a wicking bed into a warm bed and there's nothing like it out there and so the first part of this video will I'm going to show you how to make a wicking bed if you've already seen that just fast-forward through that and then the second part we're going to show you how we convert that wicking bed into a warm bed it's gonna change your whole method of gardening I think because it's so easy and worm castings in the garden are so powerful everybody should be doing this here's the tote I was talking about you see how large it is this the tone I use for Boston you can see the difference in size this one's much bigger so I'm excited to try this as a wicking bed don't really need the lid but if you want to just make a planter box out of this you can sit the tote in the lid and this will catch any excess water but so that's one thing you can do with it now for a wicking bed you need four inches at the bottom as a reservoir and no more than 12 inches soil or whatever you're going to put in here to to grow it and so one thing I noticed this is 19 inches tall so we don't want to go more than 16 inches because if you go over 12 inches then you're not gonna get the wicking that you you want so in this I don't know if you can see in the camera but this has ridges for strength in here where these ridges are they're about 15 and a half inches off the bottom so what first thing we need to do is I've got some paint here and this is enamel paint this I got for $4 a can you can buy some cheaper paint for like $1 $2 a can but I found it won't it won't adhere to the classic and some of these containers around for going on five years now so basically you want to use an enamel paint and I'm going to paint the first four inches or so inside and the reason we paint this with a white enamel and this is a flat not a gloss is because reflection I don't want the the black this of the tote to be absorbed absorbing heat in the summertime that's just a death for your year plant plants they they sense their temperature from the root system so if this tote is absorbing immense amount of heat when it's a hundred and five out your plants they're just not going to survive so by this way I have discovered that we've had no problems growing in these tote so I'm gonna paint the outside of it as well but this way I just put my my mark on there my fingerprints but this way I can keep the Sun from over baking that the roots and the rest of it I'm not gonna paint cuz it's gonna be covered with soil and the reason I'm doing this is because I can only put soil up to about this level 16 inches up and so there's going to be about three or four inches exposed all the way around this new bed and so by painting it white it'll reflect heat and won't absorb it so I'm gonna go ahead and paint this you don't need to watch I guess I could fast-forward it but anyway I'll show you the finished product and then we'll go from there our black tote is now white with the enamel that'll last I've got one like I said it's lasted about five years already and one one can of paint did the whole thing and I ran so I bought two cans just in case I didn't know but you can get away with with one can I'm going to let this dry and then we're gonna put the rest of it together I'll probably do that tomorrow and I'll show you what all pieces need to go in here what kind of soil to use and I'll give you the cost of setting something like this up and down I'm pretty excited about it we'll we'll see how all this turns out well it's the next day our paints dry and we're ready to continue on making this wicking bed so the next step is to make the drain okay so we're gonna have a four inch reservoir in here and so at four inches we want to put in a drain I've seen people put in bulkheads and valves and all kinds of pipes and but you know what the cheapest thing is just get a little 3/4 inch piece of tubing it'll squeeze in there and it works real good because if you get too much water in here you we wanted to drain out anyway so to put in the tubing I've got here it's a 7/8 bit just under sized a little bit cuz you don't want to you want to oversize so even though it's just 3/4 inch tubing you don't want to over side it and the easiest way to make this this way I've got my sharpie here now I'm gonna put it on the end here because I want to stack these up in a row and then that way I can put pipe over and I can put a cover over them because they're almost four foot wide but you can also put it in the middle if you're putting them in a lie you could put the drain and it doesn't really matter where the drain goes but what matters is is that it's four inches off the bottom [Music] and we should be able to squeeze in there we go nice and tight no you have that's that's our drain so the next step so the next step is we need to put in our fill pipe and so that's what this is and I use two inch pipe so we're gonna and this is just all press-fit there's no point in gluing it because if it leaks we don't care that's where we want the water to go anyway so we're gonna sit this in here and this is a nineteen inches tall so I cut this pipe at 20 inches just to give us and with the elbow it gives us a little bit higher so that this will be above enough so we can get a garden hose in here and fill this up now you can certainly go cheaper and use smaller diameter pipe but you'll live to regret it that's why I use two-inch pipe because as you fill it up it'll drain fasten off and there's enough volume that it won't the water will back up and overflow out the the intake if you use a smaller pipe you're gonna be frustrated or going to spend a lot more time trying to feel like if you had to go a lot more slowly anyway then we're gonna put a cap on this end we're gonna put this in there like that just sit it in there and we don't need to go quite all the way to the end so I've just made it 36 inches and so the whole point now is drill some holes yeah I'm gonna put this in the intake in where the drain plug we just put in is so that when I fill it I can see where it drains but I want the water coming in and mostly at the other end so I'm only going to drill about half of this pipe and you just take a bit and you want the bit just to be smaller than the rock you're going to use and you just go all the way through [Music] [Music] this back up here now what I like to do is have it so that the these holes are kind of not quite but so they're they're they're more angle towards the bottom and then that way the water will start draining quicker just like that I've got it set up and I always put a cap on you don't press it down hard just let it sit there so that leaves and debris doesn't come in because once you've got this pipe set in there everything all the dirt and rock and everything is going to be in here you don't want to be trying to pull this up and pull it out of your pipe because I'll just mess everything up so I just lightly cover it now before we go out and set it up I want to let you know the cost so the toque was 20 bucks and with the pipe and the rock now the rock you use that you want to make sure you have pH neutral rock so you can't just use any rock so the test for that is wherever you get your rock now I'll tell you though River Rock is usually pretty good pea gravel is pretty good if you can get shale that's a neutral rock but to tell if you take a mason jar with some vinegar in it and you drop a handful of the rock in there if it bubbles like it's boiling it's not good rock to use you don't want to you don't want the rock causing problems as it wicks up and creates you problems in your soil so you know if it's just got a bubble once in a while or no bubbles then that's rock that pH neutral that you can use so anyway now that this is basically made we'll go and we'll set it up out in the garden just realize I don't think I finished explaining the cost so you've got twenty dollars for the tote and with the pipe and the elbows and the caps and stuff you got about less than ten bucks I've got three cinder blocks there dollar 70 each and then you've got to put in your rock and that's that's where I got off on the tangent on how to pick your rock but the rock can vary where where you get it a little bit you're gonna have a weak barrier that goes down so you'll have to buy a bigger row of that at first but then once you've got it it'll make tons of these beds and then whatever soil media to put in so right now it looks like each tote can be made for somewhere between 65 to 75 dollars in materials which you know when you think about gardening that's really not too bad like I said I've already had one of these last about five years and some others for years and I've been adding to it so I really like these these totes they seem to hold up really well as long as they're they're painted so sixty-five to seventy-five dollars is your material cost they're pretty easy to do and now this is a little bit bigger but you know you get two guys on here you can't move them if you need to we're here setting up the new wicking bed worm farm and we put some an old political signs and carpet down just for weed protection and we leveled out the cement blocks so this is perfectly leveled and it's really critical probably the most critical part of the whole process is to make sure that this is level that way you get an even wicking of the water now we're gonna create the reservoir the four-inch reservoir and to do that we showed you earlier we built on our pipe so I'm going to stick it down put on this side because we'll water here and then I've got the overflow tube coming out it's back in here so we'll put water in until we see it coming out and then from that point on we'll put a bottle down here and you know as you put tomatoes or watermelon or whatever it rains the excess weren't juice will this will fill up with lemon juice and it'll come out the side and you can pour that right into your garden so now what we need to do at this end we're gonna fill this up with four inches of rock to create our reservoir and we'll just fill that up to four inches so you can see here we've got our shell it's a shell actually it's a lighter than with rock about 50% lighter which I like to use in these totes because then you can move them around if you need to also its pH neutral and it's very important that you use a pH neutral Rock the way you can tell if it's pH neutral when you go to buy the rock take a mason jar or something with you with a few inches of vinegar in it put the rock in if it bubbles it's not good rock to use that means it's not pH neutral if it doesn't bubble then you can go ahead and use that rock if you can find shale that's really good because it's lightweight but it's not necessary any any neutral granite is neutral rock so we use that in the aquaponics anyway now we've got the the reservoir built and this rock will wick and as the water it'll wick up into our medium and typically if you've seen and output examples of my wicking beds we use we we only use potting mix and compost or maybe what's it called can you submit make you light this stuff we're sitting up by the front door keep my feet Moss peat bosses is good to use anyway now we've got to put on this weed cover and I made this little slit I want it tight so I'm working with it here I put just a small enough well there we go and we do this because well when it's a wicking bed we want to keep the roots from growing down in the rock in this case we were going to want to keep the worms from going down and clogging up the rock so we start with with this end and then you put this down in there and see how it's up on the sides so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with some peat moss and we'll put that in here and we'll put it all around the edge so that this is stuck up against the side real well and then that should help keep the worms out and the water can wake up right through this no problem now we're gonna get to the good stuff this is a revolutionary new concept for raising worms it is so simple anybody can do it here in an apartment and only have a patio garden or a regular backyard or even a bigger operation this will work for everybody it is the most exciting thing I've come across and we've been doing it for a year and a half now and we've had no issues and I have to tell you how this came about about two years ago I did a class off of my meetup group beds and a friend of mine Frank he he made one took it home and he set it up just like what we've got right now he because I gave all the materials except for the media to put inside and so he put the gravel he set it all up but he didn't have anything to put inside and you know one thing led to another and time had gone by and next to it he had his worm farm that he's had for years in a styrofoam cooler and over time and it started to crack and break and it was no longer functional so because they didn't have anything else to do with it he just dumped it into the wicking bed and discovered that this is what we discovered through the wicking bed process because Mother Nature cannot wake up you know sopping wet it just wicks up a perfect amount of moisture it was perfect for the worms and one of the problems are several ways to raise worms and they all involve a whole lot more work than I wanted to do and some of them is messy so one way is to put them in a container and you feed them but you got to be real careful because if you put too much moisture in you'll kill the worms if you don't have enough moisture you'll kill the worms or they'll crawl out and leave and so it's it's a balancing act another way is stacking you've probably seen the stacking towers but then again you've got a fill-in tower yeah take it off fill another it's it's kind of a mess also at least it's more work than I want to do the third way I've seen is what they call pass-through and you build a frame in a box and you got to scrape the bottom commercial ones have a rake that kind of goes through and scrapes and then you got to pull everything off the bottom and that's just a lot of work so when we discovered here that if you set your worms up in a wicking bed because it wicks up just a perfect amount of moisture you never have to worry about your worms getting too wet or too dry it's just a perfect amount of moisture for them you just have to come out and feed them once in a while and make sure they've got food and as long as they're happy they'll stay inside now here's the thing in the summertime when it's really warm here at least in Texas when you have to 105 or 106 because we painted this bed white and because of the wicking action the material inside stays cool cool enough for the worms that they're still happy in the wintertime it's the same same thing in fact these come with a nice yellow lid in the wintertime if you want and cut a little hole right here and you can sit the lid on top to keep ice or snow out but you put in a little extra food to compost that'll create it enough to a little bit of heat that the worms they'll you know you don't put it through the whole thing you just kind of put it like on one end and let it heat up a little extra and it keeps the worm so we've gone through a winter and - almost two summers now we're on our second summer and the worms have had no issues at all has just been beautiful and the worms they they multiply they double up about every 90 days and you can't overdo because they'll regulate themselves if there's too many worms they'll slow down production or you could go into in a second bed now I've got video I'll post that about the benefits of putting worm castings in your garden it's absolutely amazing if you watch that other video you'll see my plants I put four ounce scoop in each hole when I put the plants in and the difference between this year and last year and this is terrible soil at their hand the difference is like you know Pop Warner football vs. NFL or you know a great school soccer team versus World Cup let's uh let's continue and show you how to to make one of these so I'm gonna start with some peat moss because it's it's a good bedding for the worms and it soaks up moisture real well yeah I want to show ya I'm gonna do the whole thing but if we take it I'll put it on the edge I'm gonna put some in the center too but I want to prop up this weed barrier real well so that the worms don't go down into the rock I'm sure their figure out a way but as we fill this up I want to try to keep them inside as much as possible but anyway is this saying we've we're going through our second summer in a winter and our worms have come through fabulously and because this beds bigger what we'll do when we want worm castings well load up one side with the food let the other side get eaten down and the worms will migrate over then we'll just scoop this out over here and use the castings now there's still maybe a little bit of compost not broken down but for our purposes in the garden that's not gonna be a big deal and there may even be a few little worms left and again that won't be a big deal because a worm produces so quickly having a few extra worms in your garden is not gonna be anything to worry about so that way there's no and I'm gonna probably build a sifter but there's no sifting there's no most of the work is gone there's no mess to take care of the basic things you're gonna have to take care of here is just just to make sure that there's food for the worms to eat which shouldn't be a big deal and that there's always enough liquid in here for a wicking to take place because in the winter time the wicking helps to because there's the the water moves it doesn't freeze and it'll help keep the worms a little bit warmer too but again because it's and oh I want to tell you to if it rains you you know people say well what about that's the beauty of it can it can rain and wrangle rain three inches the water will just pass through and come out this side can you come over here and so you've got this tube here at the four inch mark and we'll put a gallon bottle down here and we'll just stick this tube down in there and as the warm juice comes out and starts to fill up that bottle we just take it and we can pour it into the garden put it back here and you've always got warm tea to put in your garden so I'm gonna finish filling this out filling this up with some peat moss well not filling it but putting a couple of inches in and then I'm gonna go get the worms and we'll put those in okay the other thing I should mention is that we've kind of got this here between our roosting house and the barn because it'll get more in shade get some afternoon Sun and it'll get shade so we don't want to we want to try to shade this if possible if you put some out in the field you can put these are wide enough you can put four-foot hoops over them and I've got a video on how to make bin hoops I'm showing how to make 12-foot but four foots done the same way and then you can clip some shade cloth over it and then the summer time that'll help too right now I'm going to show you I'm going to fill this up with water that's how you do it and somehow the water is going down it'll leak through the rock I've got the water coming out at that end so it has to come all the way down here before it'll penetrate out the water coming out the hose that means our reservoir is full ok now I've also got we have rabbits so I've got some rabbit pellets to put in here that's a good for the worms and then here on the farm we get you know a lot of Oh also on this the cap just lightly sit the cap on don't push it down because everything's loose if you push it down you go to pull it up you're going to pull the whole thing out so just that's just to keep bugs and weeds and stuff from going down into the root system so there's a little bit of worm and you can put your grass clippings all kinds of stuff in here and by the way I tried to get worms locally there's a place right here in Georgetown that does worse but I've tried for weeks they won't they won't answer their phone and they don't reply to the messages and email so I just went ahead and I got them from Uncle Jim's he's real popular he does all kinds of insects and worms and right now he's got his summer he's got a sale going on you can get 2,000 red wigglers mix for for about 40 bucks so now the reason this is so important to do want to get down to the cost we bought this year 30 pounds of worm castings to in our garden by the way just a side note I have worms and all my aquaponics - that helps the aquaponics but our land around here the Texas A&M has done a study and the land around here is 0.5 with organic material and to be a healthy soil you need 5.0 so our soil here is extremely unhealthy from years and years of farming and you know organic can make I mean synthetic chemicals and it's just not so this is a way to start bringing back the land because here's the cool thing about worms you know what what comes out of the south end of a northbound worm worm food right so we call that castings and the cool thing about worm casting it's got all the nutrients it's it's extremely I don't know if it says on here but it's higher in potassium and phosphate and some other stuff then even your organic fertilizers and science don't even know how a worm can do that because it takes decaying matter and it beefs it up somehow and it's all broken down so when a root touches worm casting it can absorb all those nutrients and minerals and whatever's on that casting and once it's done that that casting is sterile and there's a word we call for a sterile casting it's called dirt so that's how we make dirt so worms are a vital part of our ecosystem and to do it ourselves so anyway back to we bought 30 pounds - 15 pound bags of worm castings that was $80 so they're very expensive now if you don't have the time and don't want to mess with it that's fine you can buy marm castings but this way it makes it so simple anybody can do it even on a busy schedule because I mean you're you're check-in the worms not even maybe five minutes a week because you're just adding some food and maybe check in and make sure you when you come out just pop it open oh yeah I can see water down there if you don't just add a little until it comes out the end and I mean just real quick and the worms will do all the work they'll they'll stay in here they'll be happy they'll keep working and nature will wick it up just a perfect amount I mean this is a revolutionary way of doing worms like like I asked please share this with everybody email it to every gardener you know put it on Facebook this we would love to have this video go viral because it's it's so unique and so beneficial for gardeners and it's so easy to do I mean little kids can get involved with this this is this is this is the next best thing to sliced bread I think this is this is going to be huge so anyway now I'm gonna put in the worms I got the worms a few days ago but I didn't have this quite ready so I put them in this five-gallon bucket and we've already been feeding them and you can see this is all worm poo around here that they started - there you go look at all those worms yeah we'll make sure that these worms you don't add to your aquaponic system because worms can't carry ecoli and you're not just not sure what these these worms weren't raised to be put in aquaponics so they sell worms they're either a lot more expensive to put in aquaponics or find somebody like me who's already got it and and put those in but look at these worms there we're gonna go down and hide the water is gonna wake up and just to make them a little a little happier I got to put some newspaper down but I'm gonna put a little bit of peat moss on top of them just because they don't like the Sun anyway there's a there's the start of your worm casting bed now the thing is with the tote and the materials and everything and the $40 for the worms we've got about a hundred and ten dollars invested in this and I can tell you this will produce probably somewhere between 120 and 150 pounds of compost a year so you figure at 40 bucks for every 15 pounds in your first year this is gonna weigh more than pay for itself so this I said it's so simple so easy now we filled it up we've done this we don't have to worry about this again for a while we get some scraps we can collect them in the kitchen throw them in here usually we're throwing all this stuff to the chickens but now we're gonna share it and put it in with the worms you can set a watermelon in here they love watermelon if you've got a watermelon that's starting to rot or isn't ripe enough and the worms will just go after it and all that extra moisture will just soak right through and leach out as worm castings so anyway hopefully hopefully you're sharing this with people hopefully you found this useful and you'll do it please if you do put comments in tell me how you're doing it how successful you are I'd love to hear from you if you have questions go ahead and comment I'll be glad to answer them if you like what we're doing here on the farm please subscribe to our Channel and we thank you for watching

Channel: Hallsome Farm

Views: 142,419

Rating: 4.8524628 out of 5

Keywords: self watering garden bed, self watering container, how to make a wicking bed, hallsome farm, permaculture homestead, sustainable farming, wicking worm bed, diy wicking bed, compost worms, worm castings, wicking bed build, wicking bed, container gardening, how to make worm castings, how to make worm tea, how to make worm farm, how to make worm food, how to make worm bedding, how to make worm compost, Turning A Wicking Bed Into A Worm Farm, Nothing Else Like It

Id: 9OPhzqddU2s

Length: 39min 26sec (2366 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 13 2018