My Glamorous Worm Farm

Worm Power

In an ideal environment, worms can consume 4 times their own weight in food per day. Compost worms and soil worms are both powerful assets in your permaculture lifestyle. Soil worms will improve your intensive garden beds. Compost worms will speed up the recycling of food waste and many weeds.  Our most invasive weeds e.g. Anredera cordifolia are best treated in liquid manure barrels when the poultry can’t eat it all.

Compost Worms Love Leftovers

Compost worms probably originated in the deep litter of leafy forests. They love climbing into decomposing matter. They breed amorously in the dark, laying their eggs on fibrous materials (we can use recycled hessian coffee grinds). If you have coffee grinds, this is one food-type that the worms adore and the chickens should probably not eat.

Big, Bold and Beautiful Worm Farms

Domestic worm-farms don’t have to look ugly. The worms can dwell quietly inside a beautiful pot plant or a tower of tins with your favourite herbs on top.

One of our inventive permaculture course graduates, Robyn Crosland, integrated her worm-farms with herb pots and liquid manure. She uses a small tower of recycled stack-able restaurant vegetable oil drums.  Chris Nathaniel, has developed a carbon fertiliser made primarily from left-over vegetable oil.  So, a little bit of left over vegetable oil also adds power.

Robyn inserts a simple ball-tap at the base of the liquid manure tin so she can harvest the fertiliser and use it to feed the top plants but you can choose to just punch a hole and let it flow out.

By integrating the waste liquid with liquid manure section we get more fertilizer which we can then feed to the plants at the top to create a closed loop, richly productive system.

The worm tower could also be used as the body of a scarecrow! If you develop a beautiful worm-farm, let us know! You can also integrate your worm-farm with other permaculture elements.

Learn more about permaculture with us with our permaculture design course.