Wednesday, June 03, 2009

The new home of the worms!


The worms have moved into their new home. I took a picture of the boxes before the transition to give you an idea of how I drilled the air and drainage holes. It may not be easy to see on this picture, but I use double boxes, the inner one has holes in the bottom to allow the worm fluid out (which means the outer one has an unperforated bottom). The long sides and one of the short sides has air holes drilled straight through both boxes - yep, I put them together and drilled, it's the only easy way to make the holes match.

These are standard boxes from IKEA (SAMLA 39*28*14cm / 15 1/4*11*5 1/2" to be exact, unfortunately the link seems to jump to anther size in the collection - use the drop down menu if you think the picture's wrong) and they have several advantages; they are relatively small, they are stackable and the worms thrive in them. This means I can easily put the vermicomposts away and they are stable when I need to stack them. And it's easy to make a bigger compost - I just make another vermicompost container and put it atop of the others. It's something like that I'm planning to do, when I've cleaned the old composts the best one will be reentering the system. Right now the oldies are drenched in pine soap water though - boy, they were mucky!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I just saw an amazing kitchen design the other day where the kitchen is connected to a home garden. If you're thinking of bringing worms indoor, what do you think about creating a long beam for plants, and then use it as decoration?

Nicolette
http://www.furnitureanddesignideas.com

Mike the Gardener said...

Nice! I love it when I see people use anything they can find to house their worms and create vermicompost....I wish more people did it as well!

Regards,
Mike the Gardener

Rosengeranium said...

Nicolette: One of my aim's to create an indoor potager (ie. an decorative kitchen garden) since I'm of the firm belief that things should be both beautiful and practical. A decorative long beam for plants sounds great, but choose edible plants like nasturtium, pansies and plants that are easy to grow like tomatoes (actually they are quite decorative too).

Mike the Gardener: Thanks! Actually it isn't possible to buy a good vermicompost like Can-o-worms in Sweden, so I have to build my composts weather I like it or not. Still, if those _were_ available here I'd probably still build my stuff, just for the sake of it :)