With summer right around the corner many avid gardeners are fertilising their plants to ensure summer blossoms.
With its focus on greening, Maropeng encourages homeowners to consider introducing a cheaper and more environmentally friendly option – a worm farm. Maropeng’s Maintenance Manager, Robere Brockman says worm farms are a great way to use up your kitchen waste and make high-quality soil conditioner or fertiliser called vermicast and a liquid fertiliser called ‘worm tea’.
He says not only is a worm farm easy to make and to look after, it will produce excellent fertiliser for your garden.
Here are some guidelines:
Worms will eat anything that once lived, including vegetable scraps; fruit and vegetable peelings; manures (well aged); tea leaves or bags and coffee grounds; torn up newspapers, egg or pizza boxes (soaked first); and crushed egg shells (this will help the pH balance.) They also love cornmeal, oatmeal, rotten and mouldy vegetables, stale bread, leftover food, pet droppings, dog hair, grass clippings, sugar, etc.
Chopping these foods up will make it easier for the worms to eat it, but it is not essential. You might want to keep a plastic container for food scraps in your refrigerator to keep them nice and fresh. “Don’t let them rot and become smelly, although the worms will eat them,” he says. Worms do not like hot spices, vinegar, citrus fruits or their peelings, oils, dairy products and meat. Brockman says if you want to feed them any of these, only do so in very small quantities and remember the greater the variety of food, the better the castings will be.
Brockman says you can make your own worm farm from various materials, or you can buy a ready-made worm farm from any of the many suppliers that stock them. You will also have to buy your starter stock of worms at the same time.
“It’s fun, it’s a great way to get rid of waste and best of all its kind to the earth. So why not make this a November project?” concludes Brockman.
