I just found this link on Utube and thought I’d share.
It ‘s a great little video showing how to put together the CanOWorms worm farm which is the one I use
worms
All posts tagged worms
It looks like the frosts are over are spring has arrived in a big rush. It was 34 degrees yesterday and we’ve had our first thunderstorm of the season.
In one month we’ve gone from a frozen solar hot water system to thunderstorms and sunburn.
The good thing about this time of year is that the babies are out in the garden in full force.
The water chestnuts are poking their heads above water, the watermelon are up, and those tomatoes and capsicums I’ve nursed all through winter are well and truly producing. Best things of all of course, are the strawberries and asparagus.
Those capsicum seeds that I sprouted in the worm farm have become two leaf plants in the garden and look quite sturdy, while the choko vine is already 1/2 metre tall.
Now, the greatest problem will be keeping the water up to the little plants. They don’t need very much but they need it fairly often as evaporation is pretty high and usually we are out of the habit of watering the garden as regularly as it suddenly requires.
I am off to build some little shade structures to try to stop my lettuce, spinach and cabbage going to seed quite so quickly, to transplant some very large tomatoes in to the garden from the pots they’ve been sheltering in all winter and to plant some corn.
My worms have recovered after their recent adventures, courtesy of the Dog, and I have made a wonderful discovery.
Hiding in the forest
Pumpkins love to sprout in the worm farm and so do capsicums and probably quite a few other things.
I end up with an absolute forest of pumpkin seedlings in there and the worms hide in there like elves in the forest, albeit snaky elves. I’ve observed these seedlings for a long time now and it will soon be time to plant them out, when the frosts are almost gone, so I thought I would see if capsicum seeds would do the same.
These seeds are fairly small, so I put them in a garlic bag, left over from that shooting garlic I had, and popped it in the worm farm. Voilẚ, I have capsicum seedlings starting.
Baby capsicums
All that is left of the poor old oregano
Three years ago, I planted oregano in the raised garden bed.
Be warned, oregano is aggressive so I would suggest that you don’t plant it in an open garden bed. It had taken over most of the second tier of the garden and was busily trying to invade the top.
My raised garden has been looking a little ragged between the oregano and the strawberries which had both run rampant, with a bit of couch thrown in for extra weeding. I don’t mind the strawberries being wild, but there is only so much oregano you can eat.
Usually, I can manage to keep the couch in the strawberries under control, but the oregano and couch share a very similar root system and became inextricably entwined. At last, I decided I needed to get tough and I have dug it all out. Underneath it, the soil was beautiful with worms and grubs and beautiful texture, so I suspect it has acted as a great soil improver, while providing me with more oregano than I could ever use.
I gave some of the runners to an Italian friend who uses oregano on his magnificent pizzas, replanted some and disposed of the rest where they won’t invade anyone’s garden or lawn.
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!
Garden Path Food 