Wormeries

[TwinSetAndPearls]

Having been very good at my recycling I would like to be able to recycle much of our kitchen waste particularly as we use the juicer a lot so have lots of pulp left over.

But have been looking on the wiggly wrigglers site and their can o worms is £90 which is just too much. Does anyone know of a cheaper supplier?

[flatmouse]

this is the one we have (I think!)

[TwinSetAndPearls]

That one is a lot cheaper. I sit easy to collect the fertilizer created?

Is it smelly and a lot of work. I know dp isn't keen for those reasons.

[TwinSetAndPearls]

But their worm tower is roughly the same price, is a worm tower a lot better?

[flatmouse]

To be fair we haven't used it since we moved 3 yrs ago - the worms had died through lack of new food i guess , but we had a big bottle of liquid fertilizer.
Not at all smelly as far as i remember - but it was kept outside. Plans are there to re-instate it soon.

[flatmouse]

No idea about worm tower sorry.

[TwinSetAndPearls]

Mine will be outside and round a corner but we are outside a lot in the summer so didn't want to ahve to study and play amongst the stench of smelly woms and rotting veg!

[Fauve]

I've got my own small worm composter and the school's Can o' Worms home for the hols to look after, so I'm going to observe carefully, to see the difference. First impressions are that the worm treat and lime mix stuff which you get with the full kit really do make for happier worms. When I brought the school one home, it came with lots of little fruit flies which have now spread to mine; so I'm having to try and get rid of them by burying the fresh food under the compost they've already made. The compost is clearly very high quality, and they seem to make lots of liquid. There's no smell.

I think you need to devote a bit of time to trial and error before expecting the composter to work well without flies or worm death - the first lot of my worms all died in the winter, because I left the (small) composter out in the cold unprotected - next year I'll stick it in an outhouse. (Although putting an old coat/blanket over it might have been enough.)

I'd say it's worth getting a small one, but give yourself time to get used to using it. I think the tower ones mean you can make bigger quantities with less effort, but I agree that £90 is a lot of money especially if you don't know whether you'll want to stick at it. I find it very rewarding, and the compost is supposed to be amazingly fertile.

[Fauve]

BTW I think the key to avoiding flies and other problems is the get the quantities of scraps added at the right level - then the worms will process them before they attract flies. In the Can o' Worms they do chomp through amazing quantities.

[TwinSetAndPearls]

thanks fauve, will maybe look for a smaller one to see how I get on, we are doing the house up and trying to make do without any help from dd father so £90 is a lot to us at the moment.

[Fauve]

Good luck! There's lots more threads on wormeries in the Gardening section here if you get into it.

[TwinSetAndPearls]

lol, I was going to say I can't believe we have womery threads archived, but having started one I can't really!

[pootlepod]

I have just got a wormery and am too, trying lots of different things. We seemed to have a lot of dead worms in week 1 but think things are improving.

I know I found a worm forum on the internet when considering buying it, might be worth googling for it as it had lots of good tips.

[Fauve]

Blimey Pootlepod, I had no idea such
worm websites existed. How exciting