The Organic Home Garden

This month we have our worm farm going great guns after the first week of rather slow worm action.
These little fellas are starting to really eat their way through our kitchen scraps and producing lovely liquid worm fertiliser to use in my organic garden!

I purchased my farm from Bunnings and it was quite cheap and I bought an extra bag of worms as well to give things a hurry up!

How the Worm Farm Works

The worm farm has easy to follow instructions and sits up on it’s own legs. This keeps it at a very workable height.

We lay a few sheets of newspaper on the top of the worms and fold the pages back to add fresh food scraps every couple of days. We use a 1 litre yoghurt container in the kitchen to place the scraps in and a larger plastic bin for the lemon skins, onion and other harsh scraps that the worms don’t like!

The farm has a tap in the front and this makes draining the fluids from the base very convenient. I collect this once a week and make up a batch of organic liquid fertiliser.

We collect rainwater and overflow water from the air-conditioner and use this in our garden. It is an obvious choice when mixing the worm fertiliser in the watering can.

Here is a mix ready to go and it does wonders in the garden and means I now can cut down on buying fertilisers and also reduce our composting activity.

Composting is too hard for most people.

Now you may think that this is an unusual statement for me the organic gardener to make. No, I am not saying don’t compost your garden and kitchen waste.
It is a clear observation on my part that composting is a skill and one that is usually successful for two main reasons;
you have a brilliant compost tumbler or you have the time and space to set up the heap properly!

Composting is an art and one that the average gardener, with a job and other responsibilities will find difficult to keep up. The amount of material needed to get the heap hot enough is usually more than one family can provide – if you have time then maybe you could get 2-3 neighbours to chip in and then you would have enough green stuff to heat it up! Oh yeah did I mention you need some straw, paper, manures ……etc

The easiest starting point for most families would be to get a worm farm and follow the instructions supplied with your kit. The worms can consume large amounts and will produce beautiful castings and liquid fertiliser within a very short time and with little effort.

Our little guys are now taking most of our green waste from the kitchen and we need to visit the compost heap very little now! (I run a heap in a black compost tub with all the dog droppings and a little straw – it is more anaerobic than aerobic so takes several months to break down. When I have autumn or spring prunings I build a large compost heap with lawn clippings and vege thinnings from the garden and that one usually cooks up a nice brew.)