Worm farming is a great way to recycle your kitchen and food garbage. Worms will eat almost everything of your kitchen’s waste and convert them into quality fertilizers. The output fertilizer created from your worm farm is great for garden soil and potted as well as indoor plants. The fertilizer is great for a vegetable patch as well if you have one in your backyard.
For a small scale worm farming project, all you need is box with holes at the bottom to allow excess water to drain and bedding materials. Newspapers, leaves, and even cardboard are good materials to create layers of bedding in the box. The bedding should be a little moist when placed inside the container. Don’t wet it too much just sprinkle with some water. Place your red or tiger worms inside the container and follow it up with scraps of food from your kitchen. Just start off with a small amount of food and increase the amount as your farm grows bigger.
It would be best to know your worms when you’re starting your project. For worm farming, earthworms are not the best worms to use. Red, tiger, or compost worms are the most ideal for farming and creating castings for fertilizers. These types are more adaptive in living in enclosed containers and are good in digesting organic matter which is what you’re going to fed them, kitchen scraps.
Castings are not the only product of your farm. The water that comes out from the drain or holes of your container is a great liquid fertilizer as well. Some would customize their containers and place collecting basins underneath the holes to collect the liquid that passes through. Believe it or not, when worm castings and water residue are used as fertilizers, flowers tend to bloom earlier. When used in a vegetable patch, the produce are much better and some would attest that the vegetables themselves are tastier.
Worm casting is technically called vermicompost and the process of creating it is referred to as vermicomposting. This is already an established field and there are experts in this area as well as commercially available resources where you can get materials like worm farm containers and supply of worms.
After several months, the worms should have created some suitable castings on the top layer. A good time to harvest the casting would when its almost full. There are several techniques in harvesting the castings. One way would be to open the lid and expose the container to light. The worms are quite sensitive to light and by allowing a significant amount of light to hit thee surface of the container, the worms will burrow deeper into the container. You can then scrape the castings after you notice that worms are no longer visible on the surface.
Other people place food on one side of the container and allow the worms to move into that area. After a few weeks, the worms will move into the area and then you can scraped off the castings left on the other side.
You worm farm should constitute a regular diet of fruits and vegetables. Do not feed them citrus fruits for this will make the container and castings acidic which is not good for the plants or for the farm. Egg shells, leaves, paper and shredded and soaked cardboards are good food for your worms. Adding dirt into the containers is a good idea as well as long as everything is done in moderation.
Did you know that nature has its own natural garbage disposal system? Not only that, this system is so efficient, that it turns garbage into useful nutrients that the earth can reuse. This natural garbage disposal system is called the worm. Yes, the lowly worm consumes our garbage and puts it back into the earth in the form of soil enriching nutrients. Before we get into starting a worm farm business, let’s discuss a bit about how worms actually help the earth.
With the millions of tons of garbage that people produce every minute, it’s no wonder that our lowly worms are having trouble keeping up with us. But there is a way to help out the worms and mother earth. That way is called vermiculture.
Vermiculture is the technical term for growing worms. Many people practice vermiculture because it’s a great way to turn organic wastes into fertile compost. This compost is used by gardeners as it creates noticeable results in the growth of plants and vegetables. Some gardeners choose to buy the worms themselves, which is yet another commodity that can be used to start a business.
You can start your own business growing worms right in your backyard. It is very easy and inexpensive, and takes very little time to maintain. With the right contacts, it is possible to make sizeable profits selling worms and compost, particularly these days when the demand for organically grown food is increasing. Here are the basic things that you will need:
Good worms
For your business to be successful you should have the best type of worms. Gardeners and fishermen (who also buy worms for fishing), like to buy quality worms such as tiger worms and red worms. You should try to get these types of worms, and you will be able to find them in any worm nursery.
Soil
Any decent soil will do, and you can just collect some from your backyard. You don’t need to buy expensive soil from the market to grow quality worms.
Containers
Worm farmers use vessels such as apple crates, plastic containers, or glass jars. Pretty much anything will work fine as long as it is waterproof.
Once you have your materials, simply line the containers with paper, place the soil in the containers, moisten the soil with fresh water, and then place your worms in the soil with some scraps of food. The only maintenance that you will need to do is regularly moisten the soil by spraying water, and occasionally feed your worms with table scraps.
Not only is having a worm farming business cheap and easy to maintain, it makes your household a lot more efficient. You can use your food wastes to feed your worms, and in turn your worms will create fertile compost that will fertilize your garden and vegetable patches. You can then also sell some worms and compost to gardeners, or give them away to your neighbors and friends.
If you are looking for a hobby or sideline business to make some extra cash, building a worm farm is definitely something worth looking into. The low overhead costs, and virtually no maintenance makes it an ideal business for people who don’t have time to nurture a bigger home business.
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