Building a Worm Mansion

This weekend, MyMan and I intend to co-opt all the polystyrene boxes from MyDad’s kiosk shop and turn them into a worm mansion. The Little Veggie Patch Co. recommends turning the first box upside down and drilling a large hole at one end of the second. The first box is only a ‘plinth’ to support the system, the second is placed just a little to one end on the platform, so the hole sits out over the first box’s edge, like a shelf, and collects the worm wee which drains out the hole into a container or watering can. The third and fourth boxes need to be punched full of pencil-sized holes, then they are lined with old newspaper and pea straw, wet down liberally, and layered with some compost – but not too much, you need to leave space for your scraps. When the three boxes (wee box & worm homes) are balanced on top of each other and topped off with a lid, you can then add your worms to the compost in Level 2 (let’s think of that first foam plinth as the ground floor foyer). When the worms (tiger/red worms they have to be – I intend to buy 1000-2000 of my own in Adelaide next month) have settled in you can start layering shredded food scraps and newspaper on top of the compost. Eventually, when the worms have worked their way through the scraps and compost, apparently they’ll move house up into the next level, leaving behind a box full of castings (a euphemism for poo) which is amazing fertilizer and soil conditioner for the garden, as is the worm ‘tea’ (it’s week, let’s call a spade a spade gardeners). Then you simply empty the castings into the garden, or under a fruit tree, or stockpile them if your worms become too prolific for just one mansion and you have to develop new property. So, if I have worm wees and poos, if I have mushroom compost from my little fungi farm, if we have chooks to eat our scraps and provide some raw-state dynamic lifter do I really need a compost pile? A smelly, fly-attracting, labour-intensive compost pile? I’d rather deal with wee and poo than rotting scraps and flies, that’s for sure. SA has enough flies without me running an incubation operation for them. Worms lay one egg per week. They love: coffee grounds, fruit & vegie scraps (shredded – smaller pieces means faster digestion), tea bags, leaves, paper and cardboard, eggshells. They hate: animal manure, alliums, citrus, dairy products and meat.