Garden Path Food

I was going to photograph my worms for you but they have suffered a slight accident and are a little camera shy at the moment. So all my wiggly worms had a half hour or so of freedom before I came home, after suffering an earthquake and probably a falling dog.

 I picked them all up and hope that they will survive since I have become rather fond of the worms, surprisingly since the smallest animal I have ever owned has been a cat.

My worm farm is not high tech, just one of those commercial black plastic ones that are sold in hardware stores, but it does a great job. The only drawback I can see is that you need to be very careful about it’s location when you live in a place with a climate as variable as this.  I had my last lot of worms for 2 years through frost and burning heat until one extremely hot day and they all up and died.

So, I thought long and hard about where they are located this time and for the last two years it has worked, in spite of some very hot days last summer.

So, I just used a cheap potting mix to set up the farm this time and top it up regularly with scraps and egg cartons and occasionally an old towel- they eat the lot. I never put in onions or citrus and I do occasionally sprinkle dolomite to combat any acidity.

The soil in this place was very flogged and has very little structure, being very sandy and I did not encounter any worm-life in the gardens at all when we set them up.  Over the last couple of years, I have managed to farm some of the worms out but also the worm liquid has often been full of eggs. I am starting to notice a lot of wildlife in the vegetable gardens now, every time I move a bundle of mulch.

Another surprise has been that once the worms established, I have very rarely had to wet the soil for them to produce liquid so I’m not sure how that happens, but the soil inside the box seems to stay a nice mulchy, moist consistency.  This may all have changed since this afternoon’s dogquake of course!