How To Make Your Own Worm Farm

Worm farming is one of the best and simplest way of advocating environmental consciousness through the process of recycling and how to make your own worm farm is just as easy as setting up your garden.

You can start building your own worm farm using old styrofoam boxes, used tires, wooden crates or similar type of box or crate containers.

You will also need to make sure the worm trays are kept moist -not too wet nor too dry, as long as it is damp and cool. Should it start drying up, just pour in water evenly until the compost bed absorb enough water to stay moist.

Various kinds of worm farm containers are available at hardware stores and garden shops, you may need to check around for fair prices and good buys, should you need to acquire new ones and save yourself the hassle of modifying boxes to make into worm farms.

Worm farms must be kept away from direct contact with the ground to prevent pests getting into the farm and there should also be a drainage tap or water collection area within the container in case it gets too wet, the liquid overflow can also be used a liquid fertilizer.

You must use special composting worms that can be purchased from garden shops and hardware stores, since ordinary earthworms are not ideal types for farming.

The ideal types of composting worms for your worm farms are Indian blues, red wrigglers or Tiger Worms.

You can start of with 1,500-2,000 worms to get your worm farm started.

Composting worms only eat organic matter, thus are good composters, instead of the usual earthworms that you find in the garden, which are earthworkers that aerate and burrow the soil and do not make them good composters.

The primary purpose of setting up a worm farm is not to mass produce worms or culture them, but to get the product that the worms produce when fed with organic material similar to that used in a compost pile.

This by-product is called castings and while it's technically worm manure, it is a highly productive fertilizer or add-on for garden soil or potted plants.

The technical term for using worms to process compost and produce castings is 'vermicomposting', and the by-product is called vermicompost or vermicast.

To get high quality castings from worm farm, it is necessary use the proper type of worms.

Getting on all fours and digging the ground to look for worms is not exactly the way to go about it, since there are actually worms that are of the composting types.

These are worms that adapt well to living in a limited area or boxed container and those processing organic waste are the ones used for worm farms.

The wrong type of worm, especially the usual earthworms, tends burrow down deep and are not suited to cramped spaces.

You may want to purchase your worms from an experienced vermicomposting supplier, as you go along, you may be able to identify your local worms and be able to establish whether or not they are good ones for suited to your farm.

An easy structure would be start the farm using a cubic container, be it a styrofoam box or wooden crate.