Worm Farming 2.0 – The Prep Work

I have been worm farming for five years now. It is a rewarding hobby as I greatly reduce the amount of disposed household waste by feeding compostable items to my worms. In addition, I get free garden fertilizer by using the worm poo as soil additive and the diluted worm juice as liquid fertilizer. In a couple of occasions, I was able to sell a container of worms to those who wanted to start their own worm farm.

Worms multiply fast, and REDWORMCOMPOSTING reckons, given the right habitat and growing conditions, they can multiply 28 fold in 90 days. That is, your 100 worms can be as much as 2,800 worms in just two months.

With that income opportunity with very little effort (since I consider it as a hobby, where I feel fulfilled whether I earn from it or not), I planned to level up the ante. I will try to grow these worms into a much larger container. The first thing I need to do though, is to learn how others do it. So what I did is to search for a tutorial about the topic, and I preferred is a video from the Philippines.

So I stumbled on this video (see below) which is part of the show “Ating Alamin” in the Philippines. The show’s title literally translates to “Let us Know”. The show has been running for decades and it is dedicated to provide information on various agriculture-related topics.

Basically, the video showed that in preparing the substrate for the worm farm, we need the following: banana tree and madre de cacao, both chopped into pieces. Mix them together and keep the mixture moist by watering them regularly, and then cover the container. Let the mixture mature for 30 days before adding the worms.

Let’s take on that challenge then!

I cannot exactly replicate what is done in the video, as I do not have a source for madre de cacao, or popularly known as kakawate in the Philippines. It acts as good addition to the chopped banana tree because naturally it is used as a green manure. I think I can still manage to do that, because I know how what I can use as replacement for kakawate.

My initial task is to look for some banana trees. It may be a bit hard to find them in New Zealand, which is a temperate country in terms of climate. However, I planted my own trees, so sourcing them is not a problem.

I chose a medium-sized tree and cut it.

I then chopped the tree like similar to what is being done in the video.

This is the first time that I will be doing this type of worm farming. As such, I decided to take the experiment a little further --- I will add some coffee grounds to the mix and let’s see how it goes.

You may be wondering how I managed to get those bags of coffee grounds. I stopped drinking coffee for months now but I can still get them. I go to gas stations and ask staff to give me the used coffee grounds from their coffee machines instead of throwing them into the bin. With that, I get a regular supply, which I used initially as a mulch for my plants.

So I put the coffee grounds with the chopped banana tree in a larger container. That container is a bottom of a big plastic drum which I got from a guy who took it from meat processing plant where he works.... and I got it for free!

I gave them a good mix and combine them to form a good substrate for the worm farm.

You may be wondering what will I use as a replacement for madre de cacao. One of the most useful plant I have in my garden is the Russian Comfrey. It grows very deep into the soil, getting all the nitrogen it can get and store it in its leaves, making it a good fertilizer and compost activator.

I cut all the leaves from this plant and chopped them like what I did with the banana tree.

I combined the chopped leaves with the banana tree and coffee ground mixture.

The next thing to do is to cover the container and as mentioned above, maintain its moisture and add the worms after 30 days.

Thank you and I hope you enjoyed reading my post. I will post an update after four weeks when we are to add our worms to their new home.

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