worm farm Archives - Permaculture Visions

December 19, 2017May 21, 2018

Worm Farms of the Great Indoors

Urban Permaculture Adventures

Growing up in a gorgeous permaculture garden builds some unusual adult expectations. Our children played with worms, cuddled chickens, climbed trees, nibbled on flowers and sometimes fell into patches of stinging nettle. When our son grew up he was shocked by the city waste and frustrated that he could no longer compost. Confined to a totally indoor existence, his idea for an indoor worm-farm was conceived.

Our first worm-farm towers were developed by one of our permaculture design course graduates, Robyn Crossland. The worm-farm adventure is ever developing.

Waste in a Tiny Space

We looked at old worm-farm systems which are pretty cool and decided to create a tiny version. The coffee-addict indoor worm farm was the smallest prototype. Then we up-sized to an old kitchen bin.

Even though we have plenty of space outdoors, we didn’t expect the indoor worm-farm to be so convenient. We loved it. The waste items that are not suitable for the poultry (such as banana peels) go directly into the worm-farm. So, we kept one for ourselves.

Do Worms Like being Indoors?

Worms like a steady temperature, they don’t like hot black housing in the full sun. Worms instinctively hide from sunlight. Nor do they thrive in cold mouldy places. Compost worms, [Perionyx Excavatus and friends] come from the tropical treetops. Our great indoors are cosy for worms, especially in winter.

Are Worms Smelly?

Worms don’t smell bad. Rotting food smells bad. Imagine having house-mates who don’t bother to put out the garbage until it gets smelly. That was the situation our son was living with. How could worms living in the food waste possibly be worse than that?

The first challenge is to learn what can be put into the worm-farm. Basically, worms can eat anything that was once living, but they prefer not to eat citrus or onion. Meat can be a problem because it goes off quickly. So leave out meat, onion and citrus and add some shredded paper and cotton rags every now and then to reduce wetness.

What Do I Need?

For a Simple Worm-farm You need:

a fully sealed but not air-tight container. It is important to be able to keep out other creatures (like cockroaches, flies or vinegar flies)
Use a recycled strong plastic bag (grain bag) with small holes cut into it for drainage. This protect the worms from accidental drowning
Position an upturned pot or two to support the bag off the base. This provides space at the bottom of the farm where fertilizer-rich fluid may collect. Also, the pots provide something for any lost worms to climb back up.
Include some bedding inside the bag. Bedding is usually an open-weave fabric. It holds the worm eggs. You can use hessian or a loose weave rag, preferably no nylon or plastics, only natural materials.

What Do I Need To Do?

Feed the worms kitchen scraps and torn plain paper. Worms love coffee grinds and banana peels. If you are going on a vacation, fill up the bin with fallen leaves and weeds from the street or your potted plants.
Take the worm bin outside periodically to tip out the liquid build-up. How often depends on how much liquid you put into the farm. We check ours each week. We don’t put any liquid into the farm, just coffee grinds and banana peels.
Sort out the worms from the castings outside or in a bathroom as it can get messy. Use the castings for potting mixture for more potted plants or feed the castings and liquid manure on a street tree or in a local park.

Advanced Potted Worm-farm system

Follow the instructions for a Basic Worm farm then add plants on top. You need:

a tight fitting pot to sit on top with potted herbs and
a feeding tube that runs all the way down the pot plant and to a hole to the worms in the next section down.
add a cap over the feeding tube (you can use an upturned pot)

Are Worms Fast? Yes But…

Worms are not the fastest composting organism but they are low risk. If you want fast composting, make a black soldier larvae farm. [Don’t have a larvae farm indoors without really strict hygiene controls].

What Kills Worms?

Like everything else, neglect is one of the biggest killers for pets. Indoor worms are likely to die from too much liquid, too little food or too much food. But there is one killer lurking in many household kitchens – insecticide. Poisons would account for sudden deaths. Avoid sprays and cleaners entering the worm bin.

Happy Worming!

indoor worm farm invented by April Sampson-Kelly — small indoor worm-farm made from old water filter

May 20, 2016May 19, 2016

Learning Outside Boosts Learning Within

Step Outside and Enhance Your Learning

Walking and being outdoor changes the brain. Students can become more creative, more observant and less stressed. There are many benefits for the students and the educators to step outside.

Sadly, teachers have a lot of administrative pressures. They have to ensure that they address the many areas of the curriculum. We can support teachers by offering them studies that explain which part of the curriculum the outdoor activities meet. Being outdoors boosts our physical and mental health.

Health, Movement & Exploration

Connecting children with nature reduces their stress. It also increases the chance of nature being less stressed by human impact. Connections with nature enable a child to understand how nature works and builds empathy for others and their respect for the natural environment on which their lives depend.

Nature-based activities can enrich the learning program. We can even go one step further and design an amazing garden class-room.

Nature-based Games & Activities

Nature-based games are as old as …?

The process of re-discovering and developing nature-based games can be a lesson in history and creativity. What did children play with before plastic toys became abundant? This is a wonderful opportunity to build imagination. Encourage the children be part of this re-discovery.

Activities include weather observations, seed-raising, ‘mini-beasts’ or ‘micro-creature’ measurements and mapping of their web-of-life, drawing and classification (worms, insects). Science experiments about pH, cooking and cultural discussions about food, hygiene and disease, microscopic adventures about fungi and bacteria, research into origins of medicinal plants and much more.

In the garden children can use tall sticks (ie. banana stems, sugarcane, sunflowers, artichokes, sage) as structural material to build tipis, towers or sculptures. The garden classroom can be a great resource for learning about aboriginal houses or traditional home structures, building and shelters. Whether you build a full-size replica or models, the children learn how to use genuine natural resources like poles and natural rope.

Weaving with edible plant material (especially from strong vines like kiwi-fruit and passion-fruit) is a meditative and mathematical activity. Food plants provide healthy, low allergy weaving and building materials.

Storytelling and Story writing

The range of light levels within a garden allows children to find their ideal light level to suit their reading, writing and working. Storytelling in an open space can be difficult in the city if there is a lot of environment noise, or it can become a theatrical challenge. The garden classroom can designed to amplify the production. Outdoors, the story-teller has an excuse to dramatise the text in order to be heard.

The garden classroom is a fresh and ever-evolving space full of material for story writing. Children can explore new ways to tell a story or better grasp old poetry, the importance of traditional story-telling, the tribal ‘sense of place’, the dreamtime and ancient maps.

But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head, 
And he swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer, 
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed, 
While the others stood and watched in very fear. [Banjo Paterson]

How Can We Design a Garden-Classroom

Apply Fundamental Permaculture Design Principles

Permaculture principles are a valuable tool to apply to learning and can guide our design of a productive learning space. There are various permaculture principles but here we can examine two of the fundamental permaculture principles:

1. Every element provides many functions
2. Every function is met by many elements.

For example: a simple letter-box/mail-box is an element. It collects the mail, displays a house number, is a guidepost in heavy weather. It can also support a vine or can be, albeit unwittingly, an insect or arachnid home. One of these functions (the less desirable one) of ‘housing insects’ can be supported by various other elements i.e. hollow trees, bee boxes or the neighbours letter-boxes :>

1. Every Element provides many Functions

2. Every Function is met by many Elements

Permaculture Principles in the Learning Space:

Every Element in the learning space
provides many Functions

One of the elements in an outdoor space is a shade-tree. This shade tree can provide many other functions: wind and rain protection, leaf litter for mulch, poles, habitat for wildlife, a structure to hang a swing or decorative artworks, a play space.
Every Function in the learning space met by many Elements.

The function – shade, can be supported by many other elements. We can use deciduous trees, domes, tipis frames with woven vines , suspended shade material (recycled sheets can be used), sun hats and/or umbrellas. Children may enjoy painting and erecting old sheets or drop-cloths as an art project to add colour to the space. Poles can be gathered from fallen or pruned branches of nearby trees. Using recycled materials and resources from nature builds empowerment and problem solving.

Ideally, the process of design consults the school staff, the community and the children. The design needs to be able to adapt to the changing community needs. Consulting the stakeholders helps us define the elements desired. Work with the shape of the land and do a full permaculture design with the confidence of knowing that compost resources will be abundant if the children deposit their food scraps and the garden. Maintenance workers can provide some weaving material as well as mulching material such as grass clippings.

Engaging Community

The school garden may be one the few green spaces in a city. Many of the residents near the school welcome the opportunity to participate in growing food, creating a beautiful gardens with the children and increasing habitat for birds and native bees.

Encourage the community to find ways to safely integrate adult participation. Perhaps the adults are active in a separate area at a separate time to the children. Hopefully there will be times when the whole community can come together to plant trees or tend the garden or celebrate the harvest.

“Now, you’re talking!”

There are some food plants that get adults truly motivated. These include such as coffee bean and green-tea bushes, native foods (bush tucker and survival foods), culinary flowers and spices. If you are lucky to have immigrants living in your area, invite them to share their stories about food and spices and how it is traditionally grown and used.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. … There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

March 27, 2016May 27, 2020

My Glamorous Worm Farm

Worm Power

Cuban potting mix made with worm-farm castings — Cubans using worm-farm castings

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.

February 18, 2013

Our Chickens, Weeds, Worms Tower System

This Chicken Tower system was invented by April Sampson-Kelly in 1996. She has reillustrated it this week for our course notes. The Chickens have garden weeds for picking at, and nesting in, their manure and scratchings feed the Worms in the bottom drawer of the Tower. Rainwater is also collected, fed to the chickens and worms and recaptured in a tank for the garden. Another smaller worm farm tower was invented by one our graduates.