Worm tube/tower update. Last fall, I set up 4 raised beds, each 2’ x 3’, and put a worm tube in the middle of each of them. Each tube had 12 1” holes drilled to be below the soil level. I posted some pictures of the beds and some people asked about the tubes so I thought I would give an update. I bought a pound of worms from Vermillion Wormery in Oracle and divided them among the 4 tubes. I started the tubes with some bedding of wet newspaper and cardboard with some compost and added the food to the top of this. I always put the kitchen scraps thru a food processor to chop them up and they disappear very quickly in the tubes – the worms devour them. I covered the food with a wet rag and had a cover on the tube with small holes. All 4 beds have produced really well – 1 had spinach, 1 had beets, 1 had broccoli and 1 had other large greens including cauliflower, collard, cabbage, and kale. Spinach harvested twice with large batches and still going strong, harvested beets today and have a lot more, harvested all major heads of broccoli and some small shoots underway, cabbage soon, and kale and collards just keep going. Hard to say how much the worm tubes helped but it definitely didn’t hurt. Today I pulled the tubes up, emptied them, separated the worms and castings and restarted the tubes. Don’t know how many worms were out roaming in the beds but there were lots of worms in the towers and lots of baby worms as expected. Obviously this handled the cold weather well as I didn’t cover any of these. Roots from the plants had grown thru the holes into the tubes so they were being fed well. I saved probably 3+ pounds of castings for later use – really great stuff. Separating the worms and castings is time consuming but the insides of the tubes came out with the tubes. The bottom half of the dirt had minimal worms as the worms were toward the top in the more recent food. Pictures show the beds when I started, one of the tubes after I pulled it out, the contents of one tube after if was dumped and the saved castings. I’m very pleased with the results as the beds have done well, lots of castings were produced and the worms should do really well over the next 3 months as the weather warms up. Also, I wouldn’t expect any issue with this approach over the hot summer as the worms should be cool in their moist tube. One observation: a lot of moisture is produced when the worms convert the scraps and I don’t think it’s necessary to add water to the tube – I did keep the rag in each tube moist if the tube was drying out – rarely had to wet it.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 01:46:18 +0000
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