Regular contributor Tricia Hogbin of Little Eco Footprints shares a simple eco-friendly project perfect for introducing children to the superpowers of worms!
Making a worm farm using free and recycled materials is easy – easy enough that children can do it themselves with just a little help. All you need is a couple of recycled Styrofoam veggie boxes, a handful of compost worms and some worm bedding. Within weeks you will be reducing your household waste and producing fertiliser for your garden.
You will need:
- Two styrofoam produce boxes. You can get these from your greengrocer. Make sure at least one has a lid.
- Knitting needle, chop stick, screwdriver or other sharp tool for making holes in the styrofoam box.
- Worm bedding. A bucket of compost is ideal worm bedding. You can also use shredded paper, leaves or old straw.
- A big handful of compost worms. You can buy compost worms online, or better still get your worms from a friend or neighbour who has a worm farm. An easy way to collect worms from an existing worm farm is to crack an egg in one corner of the worm farm. Return a day later and that corner will be full of worms ready to collect.
- A newspaper
How to make your worm farm
Poke holes in the bottom of one of your boxes. This box is the ‘feeder box’ – where the worms will live and feed.
Half fill the feeder box with the worm bedding. Make sure your bedding is moist but not wet. If you are using dry materials like straw or shredded paper, wet them first and then squeeze out any excess water.
Carefully scatter the worms on top of the worm bedding. A handful of worms will contain around 1,000 worms.
Soak the newspaper in water and lay it on top of the worm bedding. This will help keep the worms’ home dark and moist.
Place the feeder box on top of the box that doesn’t have any holes. This lower box is where you will collect the worm wee. Place your worm farm in a shady spot in Summer and a sunny spot in Winter.
You can decorate your worm farm using permanent markers.
How to look after your worm farm
- Leave your worms to settle in for a week.
- After a week you can start adding kitchen scraps on top of the bedding, underneath the newspaper. Add only small amounts (around a handful) initially. As more worms breed they will eat more food. Eventually your worm farm should be able to handle most of your kitchen scraps.
- Keep the top layer of newspaper damp and replace as needed.
- To harvest the worm castings move all the castings to one side and add fresh bedding to the empty side. Most of the worms will move to the fresh bedding and in a few days you can then remove the castings. Worm castings are a great plant food. Grow seedlings direct in the castings or use it to top dress your pot plants or garden.
- The worm wee is a super plant fertiliser. Pour the worm wee from the bottom box into a watering can or bucket and dilute 1 part worm juice to 20 parts water. It is too strong to use undiluted.
- You can eventually increase the size of your worm farm by adding an additional feeder box on top, creating a multi-story worm farm. The worms will migrate up through the holes to the new bedding. After the worms have all migrated to the top box you can plant seedlings directly into the initial feeder box to create a miniature garden.
Wishing you and your children loads of messy fun making a worm farm.
Check out more of Tricia’s playful ideas for kids (and their families)…
10 Easy Ideas for Making Art Outdoors |
Active Learning Through Messy Play |
Installing Speed Bumps to Television Viewing |
Outdoor Play Ideas for When It’s Raining or Dark |
Tricia is a nature-loving mum passionate about learning to live better with less. Working in threatened species conservation she has gained an increasing appreciation of the huge impact our consumption habits have on the environment. She hopes to inspire other families to live a little better with less too. Having recently made a 'tree change', you'll now likely find Tricia excitedly playing outdoors with her daughter, adding to her small flock of chooks and pottering in her new garden.
That is an awesome tutorial Tricia, and makes it sound so easy. I have heard people say you need to pre-blend your scraps before giving them to the worms, but we just all our excess scraps (excess meaning the ones the chooks won’t eat) into a boring old black compost bin, and it is FULL of worms.
But I do just happen to have two of those produce boxes sitting around, one with a lid and one with out. And that compost bin is just about chockas… So I think this could be a project to do with my seven year old on a weekend soon 🙂
Yes – I’ve heard the same. The smaller the pieces the quicker the worms can digest. If the pieces are too big they rot before the worms can eat them. But we’re the same – the worms only get what the chooks or guinea pigs don’t want so they don’t get too much at once.
Would love to hear how you go if you do make one. Little Eco had loads of fun helping to make ours.
I’ll let you know how it goes 🙂
I love this idea and have been wanting to do a worm farm for ages but not got round to it and worried it wouldn’t cope with the quantity of food scraps we generate. We currently use the bokashi system but find that we fill a bin once a week, mainly fruit/vegetable peelings, not meal leftovers which is much quicker than the suggested three week period. We don’t have enough garden space to bury it as frequently as required. Would the worm farm cope with this quantity of kitchen scraps? Can you put meat scraps in a wormfarm? Do you have any experience of using the bokashi system?
My reply is below Mrs Pelican – for some reason it came up as a general comment rather than reply to you.
Worm farms are best for just a small amount of scraps at once. You could have a few worm farms going at once 🙂
A worm farm would help reduce the amount that goes in your Bokashi bin. I use a mix of compost, worms, chooks and guinea pigs to deal with our scraps. i think having a few options is a good idea.
And meat scraps would be best in your Bokashi bin – they will only attract mice and blow flies to your worm farm.
I haven’t used the Bokashi bin – because I’ve always had outside compost bins. but I do have friends that have one. They look like a nice easy option for when you don’t have space for an outdoor compost bin.
One day our two-year old saw an earthworm on the walkway and was fascinated. (He pronounces them “wums.”) So, I took him over to the loose bricks that lined the front garden and started turning them over one at a time. Many had earthworms under them, which we would watch until they wiggled back into the ground. Now it’s hard to take him out the front door without flipping a brick or two just to let him say hi to the “wums.”
Simple pleasures.
Gwynn
I love this story Gwynn. Thank you for sharing 🙂
Hi Tricia, we made a similar one at Purple Pear Permaculture Playgroup.
http://purplepearorganics.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/produce-no-waste.html