Many of you no doubt have seen my recent Worm Farm and The Many Gifts of a Worm Farm articles. Also, as you may have read I am considering a second farm, however being budget aware I am not too keen to fork out for another Can’O'Worms. I have though found a nice way to build a worm farm that is both inexpensive and reuses one of the most common and hard to dispose of storage boxes, the polystyrene box.
The polystyrene box is great when moving breakables or shipping items that require insulations, such as tropical fish. However, once empty can become hard to dispose of and becomes nothing more than a nuisance. Even when broken up it consumes a large volume of space in the bin, and due to its inherent construction, it also consumes space in a landfill for years to come. As you can tell I am quite passionate about this as we have a number of these stored for the pending move and I know that once we have moved that we will have these things hanging around for months to come. I am thus quite looking forward to reusing these as a worm farm.
The idea has come from the Worm Farming article posted on the City of Ryde web site. The approach takes advantage of the longevity of polystyrene. The irony is that this is the facet that makes polystyrene a menace to the environment and is being used to assist the environment. By reusing these boxes we can improve our own gardens and reduce landfill. Surely that is a win all round.
Basically, the construction is simple. The steps are:
- Obtain 2 polystyrene boxes of the same width and length.
- Obtain 1 lid that will fit the boxes.
- Carefully pierce holes in the base of 1 of the polystyrene boxes.
- Place the pierced box on top of the other. The base box will collect the liquid fertiliser, or worm tea.
- Build up a 10-15cm bedding of shredded paper, leaves, and finished compost.
- Add 1000 worms. Check out “the big kids toy shop” (Bunnings), your local garden centre, or Google worm farm to find out who sell worms in packets suitable for worm farms.
- Cover the farm with damp hessian, paper, or carpet scraps. This locks in the heat and moistness, whilst blocking out the sun.
- Wait a few days, and then begin adding food scraps etc.
I would suggest that you could add more containers as needed, however given the dimensions of most polystyrene boxes that would be a lot of waste.
I am considering constructing one of these in the coming days. Especially since Hamper King delivered frozen hampers in polystyrene boxes on the weekend that are superflous to our needs, and the current stack of cardboard, we have a heap of food for the worms to process. If I proceed I will post pictures as a step by step guide.
