Leonie has recently published an inspirational book called “Eat Your Garden.” We had a recent look at it and it features her worm tower in it as well. A beautiful elegant solution to creating sustainable abundance. The worm castings will leach out into your tank garden and you will be feeding your plants from the roots up. Make sure to wipe the pipe down with a damp cloth to remove the dust. They wont escape either unless you stop feeding them. Give the top half of your pipe a sand with some rough sandpaper. As long as they have a food source left in the tower they will turn the animal manure and vegetable scraps into high quality worm castings and worm juice that the plants will love to eat. The compost worms will get to work on the manure and come up at nibble on the vegetable scraps. You can also throw some shredded moist cardboard into the tower or straw or raked up garden leaves. Worm towers are built with food scraps, dried leaves and composting worms to produce vermicompost - a natural source of fertiliser and soil amendment. Worms don’t like the light so give them a comfortable home to live it. Throw in your garden scraps and secure over the pipe a removable container. Do not use normal garden worms as these are usually a different sort of worm that are more solitary creatures and wont do the job that composting worms are able to achieve so well. A small bucket of worms can house easily more than 1000 red wrigglers. Introduce your compost worms into the tower. Good soil bio-diversity is always a good thing! Geoff Lawton favours mixing your manures as this gives your system a “high octane” blend that will have your microbes jumping for joy. Horse, cattle, sheep or chicken is perfect. If your tube is white, or at least light colored, and youve added some extra air holes, I suspect it would be totally fine in the sun especially if it is. Half of the tower should be sticking out.Įmpty a bag of manure into the tower, filling the tower half way up the pipe. We don’t want any chemical nasties leaching out.īury the tower about half way down in your tank garden. PVC is okay but check to see that it is food grade. The wide 12 inch concrete pipes are ideal. As Geoff Lawton says “If its lived before – it can live again!” That makes good advice for what you can use in your container garden tank.įind a large 3 to 4 foot pvc or concrete pipe. Eventually the whole thing will turn to compost anyway but may take some time. You could make your own from stacked timber sleepers or concrete slabs.įill the tank with soil or create your own soil from filling the tank with newspapers, cardboard, garden clippings and alternating the layers with rotted compost or manure. The one we filmed was made of zinc aluminum but any type will suffice. Here’s a basis rundown on how to build your own Worm Tower.įirst secure yourself a tank garden. It was laden with thousands of Compost Worms and the vegetables grown were bursting at the seams with goodness. Some people are worried about using PVC pipes and the one we filmed was made of a heavy concrete pipe construction. Best Budget: FCMP Outdoor The Essential Living Worm Composter at Walmart. While filming a segment with Geoff Lawton recently in his “Soils” DVD we saw an interesting variation that was built into a tank garden laden with vegetables. Best Overall: Worm Factory 360 Composter at Walmart. Well the idea seems to have caught on as little colourful worm towers are now springing up everywhere in the Permaculture landscape. Less garbage headed to the landfill, great benefits to your gardens soil.A few years back we put this short video clip up on YouTube with Permaculture Schools Gardening expert Leonie Shanahan talking about her worm tower. If possible use a clay or concrete pipe for your tower, otherwise use a PVC pipe. Even an apartment dweller could do this - just bury the pvc pipe in a planter filled with soil. Worm towers are a great way to add nutrients to your garden. A tower like this is suitable for backyard gardeners and those using the square foot gardening method. The worms will travel in and out of the holes, improving your soil while they gobble up your waste. ![]() To make one, you drill holes in a length of pvc pipe, sink it in the ground, and add kitchen scraps. It's simple to turn a length of pvc pipe into a worm tower that takes up very little space. ![]() If you've been considering composting, but hesitate to try the simple lazy person's method (which I'm quite good at!) or if the idea of worms in your house is just too much for you to stomach, you might consider making a worm tower. Piling kitchen waste in the yard? Kind of goes against all of the "don't be a litterbug" campaigns we were raised with, doesn't it? While composting doesn't have to take up a lot of space, or be a lot of work, it can be daunting for first-timers.
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