From Scraps to Soil Gold- Unlocking the Secrets of a Compost Worm Farm - Worm Farming For Compost

Oh, and by the way, this video is sponsored by theweedygarden.com Sounds like the cicadas just woke up again because it's warming up after lunchtime here in the Weedy Garden. Welcome back again to another episode of Weedy's Little Walkabout in the garden up here on the hill. We've reached so far as we've come up to Wormville. I call it Wormville. I call it Wormville because I get the association that I have built a city and it's like I've filled up all the supermarkets in that city with food. I've built apartment buildings throughout the city. I basically prepared a city and then I introduce a few busloads of inhabitants, which is my couple of handfuls of worms in the beginning. Compost worms, different from earthworms. Earthworms, they live deep under the ground. They live like two to six meters under the ground. The compost worms, they like to live in the first six inches or so. Okay, I'm going to take the temperature of it. So the temperature here is at the moment 29 degrees Celsius. And if I measure the outside here and just watch the temperature, it stays at 29 degrees. So it's the same temperature as outside up against the sides of the worm farm. But then if I take it kind of in the middle, see, and we just wait for a little while, you can see the temperature rises, 32, 33, and it gets a bit warmer. You can see it's a bit warmer in the middle, but that's okay because worms actually like a thriving temperature of 37 degrees, which is the same as our body temperature. Body temperature, my body temperature is probably about 39 today. The more you feed the worms, the more worms you'll get. Until the bathtub is too small for all the worms. Check this out underneath here. See how they've all gathered up there to just eat the banana. See how much they love the bananas. If I dig down further, look, look at them all. If you ask yourself where on earth is the most concentrated place of beneficial bacteria, that's actually inside the gut of the compost worm. The earthworm that lives deeper down doesn't eat too much of organic material. It's in fact eating the worm castings from the compost worm. It's more interested in eating the bacteria that's come out of the compost worm's gut. Imagine it's like a whale, it's just going through the soil, eating the small bacteria like quill. The whales on the soil, it's the earthworms, but these ones are the compost worms. They do the initial decomposing. See that's a black soldier fly larvae. They also live in the compost if it's like very wet and very warm. They co-exist actually, the worms and the soldier fly larvae. They're called black soldier fly larvae. But it's okay because they actually break down the compost five times quicker than the compost worms do. And the chooks love them, so I feed them to the chooks if I catch one every now and again. See because it's got different ingredients and different temperatures throughout the whole thing, the worms kind of find the spot that they prefer and sort of eat from there. You can see there's a little pocket of worms, just a little pocket there eating on something that they like and then they'll move about. That's just a ball of goodness right there because all this is worm castings in here. It's all been eaten like months and months and months ago. If you dig down the bottom, see all that's just worm castings ready to put on the garden. And what you could do is I could take a big handful of this because the worm juice that comes out underneath, that contains a few unlucky bacteria that have kind of got washed through the system and end up in the bucket down the bottom, right. But most of the bacteria are in here in the worm poo. And so if I put like a handful of this in a bucket and squirt it with the hose, that'll like knock all the bacteria off the material and spread them out in the water and that'll make my worm juice fertilizer a lot, lot stronger. I burst it with water and knock all the bacteria off. Okay and then what we have to do is we just put it in the watering can now. See I've put all sorts of stuff in this. This basil, this is all my basil. Obviously they've eaten all the leaves and this is also what's left of my basil. It's a bit gluggy in some places because it's been raining a lot so the water comes in and kind of makes it a bit gluggy. A lot of bananas in here, that's a nice potassium. I've got coffee grounds, there's lots of worms here but if you think about what you want out of the worm castings, like you want a potassium rich worm castings, then feed it lots of potassium rich food. Right look this is all the banana peels because we had a nice big harvest of bananas. So there's most of the banana peels. So that'll give it even more potassium. If I came out tomorrow or in a couple of days look underneath there all those worms would be loving all this new banana peel. So a lot of banana peel. If you want it to be full of micronutrients and minerals then feed it comfrey and seaweed. They'll eat anything, anything that can decompose the worms will eat pretty much. They don't like to have too many orange peels or citrus peels all at once. They don't seem to like too many onions either all at once. Sometimes I put a dead cane toad in here as well. I bury it down a little bit deeper so it doesn't smell and you know in a couple of weeks that'll be turned into worm castings as well. But generally speaking a little bit of this a little bit of that keeps the worms happy and they eat. I think they eat their own weight in food every day. So there's all sorts of different little animals living in here. They're all part of the process of decomposing what's in here, all the dead stuff. You can see the tiny little mites running around in there. They also just live on the surface. You see that the worms are living underneath. So they're all living in harmony. Again they're just eating the decomposing material in the worm farm. All the juices in all the all the material. That's a banana. There's a bit of juice in there. All the juice in here. That's what comes through and filters through and a little bit of rain that gets in is what filters through down here. So and down under here I've got a little pump that's run by the solar power panel up there. See and that cable runs a little electric cable all the way up here. So you've got the solar charger here which charges the battery and runs a little compressor inside that pumps oxygen down into the drum and pumps little bubbles through it. So it keeps it aerated and keeps it fresh. Keeps it like we want it. Like a fresh forest in the morning smell. And when I use it to water my vegetable garden I just fill up this rusty old tin about halfway and then I just pour it in here and mix the rest with water. And if I'm going to be doing my bacteria juices here I've got my different bacteria juices. This one is my mother brew and if you look in her it's just really looking nice. It smells pretty good in here. It looks pretty fine. It's always going to be a little bit of mold on top but that's a healthy sign as long as it's nice and white and smells nice and sweet like cider. My mother brew. And here I've got some bananas going up in here. I've got some comfrey going up in here. If you didn't see the video about my bacteria juice you can see it up here on this video here. This one has got comfrey in it I think. So you have a look down there you can see all that mold on top of the comfrey. That's okay that's just the aerobic environment where the mold can live. Having a good life. Underneath it's nice and fresh and aerobic where our little lactobacillus bacteria are chomping away at the comfrey. And if I pour some out and have a smell of it. It smells really beautiful actually. Gosh it smells beautiful. Smells like fresh comfrey after the rain in a cup of cider. That's what it smells like. So take about 100 millilitres and then I fill that out with my water. And then they're ready to go in the garden. And then it's a good thing to remember to do greens and browns. That means like green organic material versus brown organic material. Anything that's been laying in the sun for a long time that used to be green is brown after laying in the sun. Because all that nitrogen gets oxidized by the sun and just evaporates back into the atmosphere. Because atmosphere isn't 78% nitrogen. So nitrogen becomes brown if it's just laid outside for a while. Okay. Things like in notes when you're doing a YouTube video if they made a paper. And you finish the video you can just chuck them in the worm farm as well. That lovely footage of the black soldier fly laying its eggs. That was done while I had this cover off. So so I put this cover back. I've got one trapped in there so I'll get him out. So here we go. So so actually what they do is they sit on top of the metal mesh here and they drop their eggs through the mesh and it goes through the gauze and down into the worm farm. So they do actually get their eggs in there. They're clever little things those black soldier fly. Oh yeah and you know that a worm can lay about three eggs at a time and it does that like a few times a week and takes about one month for them to hatch right. So if you think about one worm it can make about 160 worms in about a month or two. So you can imagine population explosion if you keep feeding the worms and they've got room and food. If you run out of food then they'll just start to starve. The little young ones are going to be the first ones to die because they're the most vulnerable and the eggs if a little one hatches and there's not enough food around it'll die as well and then the adults and the adolescents they'll crawl away crawl out and find somewhere else to live. Okay so I don't actually water any of this worm juice or any of this bacteria juice on my food first because I've got my swales down there and I feed my food first in a totally different way. So in the next video I'll tell you all about the swales and how I feed my food first but until then if you do have a bathtub that you're not using highly recommend it to make it into a worm farm and create your own wormville. Until then see you on the next video have a nice day. Oh it's a little cuckoo melon. I'll eat you. See just got some of my full potential right here.