Worm Tower
Hi everyone!
Sorry for the lull in posts as of late – I’ve been pretty busy with a variety of things, and just haven’t been hit with the inspiration to write about my own worming activities (nothing too exciting to report on).
Anyway, I happened upon an interesting YouTube video today and thought it was definitely worthy of posting here – especially given the need for something new! It is really interesting how people focused on the same field of endeavour, but working completely independent of one another, can come up with similar ideas! The ‘Worm Tower’ is actually very similar to a concept I’ve had in my head for a backyard vermicomposting system (in particular, I thought it would be great as a pet waste vermicomposter). The main difference is the fact that I envisioned the use of a plastic garbage can buried in the ground, rather than the plastic tube (which is actually a really nice way to simplify (and make less expensive) the concept.
As the person in the video alludes to, this type of system is a great in situ composting system. That is to say that you don’t even need to harvest castings from it. Simply locate it in the vicinity of some plants (you could have several of these in your vegetable garden, for example) so they can directly benefit from it. I’m not sure I agree 100% about the composting worms going out into the soil to deposit castings though – I suspect that most of them would remain within the tube. That being said, just via the activity of all manner of different creatures (including actual soil worms) and plant roots etc, the benefits of the castings would certainly spread out into your soil in general.
Pretty cool! Now I really can’t wait to construct my garbage can system.
Too bad we are still in the dead of winter here (oh and the groundhog also ended up scared by his shadow – haha)!
Oh well – I guess I’ll have to settle for playing with my big winter worm bed (should have an update on that this week for sure) for the time being.
Written by Bentley on February 3rd, 2009 with
6 comments.
Read more articles on Videos and Worm Bins.
Bentley
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282 lb of Food Waste, and Counting!
#1. February 3rd, 2009, at 9:33 PM.
This is a great idea. I imagine having a bunch of them in my garden and pulling them up to till at the end of the season.