Tribewanted: Vorovoro

In Australia I worked for 18 months in a greenhouse and we often sprayed diluted “worm tea” (really worm poo) on the leaves of the tomatoes and cucumbers as a sort of “pick me up” for tired plants. The results were always amazing. Therefore I suggested to Liavi that we could perhaps build a wormery feeding the worms with kitchen scraps to assist his gardening. The idea is to collect the percolated nutrient rich liquid that worm farms produce and which sells for enormous amounts of money in Australia.

Liavi took this offhand suggestion seriously and when I returned a week later, had the best part of it made! This design which I saw at a friend’s house, is an elevated 8’x4’ box with a sloping bottom such that one end of the box is 6” deep and the other end is almost 1 foot deep. There are sheets of old corrugated roofing iron at the bottom of the box sloping towards one side. The whole unit is filled with a mixture of sandy soil, garden compost (both decomposed and yet to be) and a little fire ash. In Australia, my friend has a shade cloth roof over his unit and he has an old carpet on top of the compost. I figured that we didn’t need the roof as our worm farm is under the breadfruit trees and I put a layer of the leathery dead leaves on top of the heap to shed excess water. Yes, and I even found the elusive Vorovoro earthworms, thought to be extinct by locals. There was a small number in residence in Liavi’s compost heap, although I was disturbed to see a that a short while after I added the worms to the system, some ants were dragging them out towards some evil purpose…not at all in the spirit of the enterprise. I then added some old paint tins to the legs to fill with water as a water barrier to eliminate the ant element. For capturing the worm tea, I added on a PVC gutter under the end of which I will place a collection drum.

I am a bit concerned that the sandy soil I used requires more water to maintain life for the worms, but hopefully, the compost will make up for it. I’ve asked the kitchen staff to daily add fresh food scraps to feed the worms and to sprinkle on the used dish rinsing water. I might also dig up some worms from my own garden to bolster the local population.

RESEARCHERS!!!
Once again, I’m firing in the dark a bit, going from memory of something I’ve seen long ago, so if there are real worm experts out there who can give me better instruction in the art of worm culture… I’m all ears.