Harvesting the Worm Swag

Posted in A day in a worm farm, The Worm Swag on Aug 02, 2017

I went in the garden today and noticed that the mulberry tree is fruiting! I think it has been two years that I planted these trees from cuttings donated by Annette, a member of "Swap Your Crop" Facebook group. How exciting! This reminds me of my childhood in New Caledonia, I used to climb mulberry trees and spend hours eating the fruits.

I need to take care of those two little trees. So today I decided to harvest my Worm Swag for the first time and add the vermicompost to the pots.

So the Swag was designed to be harvested from the bottom. There is an opening in the fabric that is held clos...

The Worm Swag: Food challenge part 2, results after a week

Posted in A day in a worm farm, The Worm Swag on Apr 09, 2017

After a week, there are still many food pieces left but they are all difficult to break down food pieces (banana peels, avocado skins, citrus skins etc...) but as you can see on the below images, the level has dropped down quite a bit.

The Worm Swag: Food challenge part 2

Posted in A day in a worm farm, The Worm Swag on Apr 04, 2017

Tonight, my kitchen scraps collection bucket is full again. The other worm bins have already been fed over the weekend so I wanted to retry the previous challenge and see if I can consistently get the same results or if it was fluke. But this time I won't prepare the food scraps and will dump straight on top of a thick layer of shredded cardboard.

This is how the content looked like before I added anything as part as today's experiement. You can see it has dropped quite a bit, almost like if the 10L from the last experiment have all vanished...

As usual, a lot of dry bedding material is added...

The Worm Swag: Food challenge part 1

Posted in A day in a worm farm, The Worm Swag on Apr 04, 2017

On March 18th I decided that the Swag was ready for a food challenge and dumped into it 10L of kitchen scraps that I have gradually collected over the week in a indoor composting bucket. Reminder: that Swag has been started about 3 months prior to the experiment and was filled with bedding and worms from several RELN Worm Factories (Australian domestic worm bins).

The food scraps has prepared by mixing it with hand torn newspaper and adding a little bit of garden lime (calcium carbonate) to help control the pH (acidity). I usually add dry bedding materials (newspaper, corrugated cardboard) to ...

The Worm Swag review update

Posted in A day in a worm farm, The Worm Swag, Product Reviews on Dec 17, 2016

This is a follow up on the Early Worm Swag Review.

No long after the previous review of the Swag, I started filling it with shredded cardboard, Worm'ditioner and food scraps. I have not added the worms yet to let the food break down and give time for bacteria to colonise the system.

Getting the food ready with some bedding material. Some of the bedding and Worm'ditioner has already been mixed into the scraps

6 inches of bedding material and then the food scraps is added on top

A bit more Worm'ditioner

I then covered the whole thing with more bedding material

2 days later, I could see that ...

Early review of the Worm Swag

Posted in A day in a worm farm, The Worm Swag, Product Reviews on Dec 12, 2016

Worm Swag Review

A little bit of history

When I decided to get more seriously into worm farming, I was researching on various models of worm farms that I could use. Not knowing anything, then, about the importance of breahability, depth, surface area etc... what I was after was the look... Then I read a lot of good things about the Worm Inn and found the Red Worm Composting blog and The Worm Dude (the manufacturer) where you could see the product under tests and it was amazing. Jerry "The Worm dude" Gach was throwing all sort of scraps without chopping, like whole pumpkin, never torn or shred...