Farm-life is many things, but glamorous is not always one of them, sometimes you really have to get your hands dirty and really get down to the grubby tasks.

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One of my latest projects was to transform an old 5000 liter water tank into a functional worm farm, that is able to produce a sustainable amount of worm juice and castings that can be used on the farm in the gardens and on smaller cash crops, because there is nothing better than having a system in place that is able to maintain itself while adding value to the other running systems already in place.

So this is the tank that I started off with, it was an old cracked water tank that we had on the farm and could no longer use for retaining water, we sawed the top and initially we wanted to use to make a small splash-pool to relax in in the warm summer months, but we decided that it would be better to cement a splash-pool in stead and the container seemed perfect to start a worm-bin in.

The first thing that I needed to do was to fill the bottom of the container with some rocks that would serve as a filtration system, but in stead of rocks I made use of some building rubble from the old pigsty's we broke down, this helped me clear up some unwanted waste while serving a purpose in stead of just being dumped. now there were two slight problems with this, the first was that the pigsty's were built reasonable far from the house and gardens - for obvious reasons, and lugging the rocks all the way to the bin with a wheelbarrow was tiring work, the other problem I encountered was that my puppy, whom firmly believes that the world needs to stand still when he wants love kept on running in front of the wheelbarrow before rolling on his back with the hopes of a belly rub, I nearly ran the damn dog over with the wheelbarrow a few times by accident, and a few more times with intent...

And no, puppy is not the Weimaraner in the picture above, but he is in the picture below.

Once I managed to fill the base with enough concrete chips, I started adding a decent layer of rocky well draining soil, for this I made use of some of the soil that was dug out for the 'one day' splash pool, luckily this was a lot closer to the worm bin, but still far enough to get me working up a sweat, especially seeing that I would constantly need to dodge the puppy while I was shoveling the sand onto the wheelbarrow, because whenever he could he would just jump in front of the spade flop on his back and ask for a belly rub, It was really really cute... the first few times, but it quickly grew old after the first few times he almost got himself decapitated.

Now there was a time when 'Puppy' was called Bruno, but after saying 'stupid puppy' ever so often the name 'Puppy' just kinda stuck.

And then shit got real - the next step was to mix a whole bunch of cow manure with decent soil, to make the base layer of the worm-bin and layer that on top of the sand and stone already in the bin. Just a handy tip if you would like to start a worm bin of your own, even if it is on a smaller (or larger scale) adding manure can be a great asset, but if you are using cow crap make sure that it has been properly aged, using fresh cow poop could be very acidic and bad for your worms.

So this mixed layer can be seen in the picture below, this picture was taken of me standing in a pool of shit technically. But in my defense I needed to get inside the tank in order to level out the soil/manure mix...

And before I started adding the worms to their new home, I tore up some old egg cartons and roughly scattered that into the bin. layering some un-printed paper or in this case the egg cartons into your worm bin will serve as a love-shack/bedroom area for the worms at a later stage as the bin starts filling up, the paper will also double as a food source wile being a great way to lock some additional moisture into the ground in the mean time.

From here on out I will start adding worms to the bin, followed by daily helpings of organic kitchen scraps, weeds and grass, which the worms will then transform into a grade liquid fertilizer and worm castings to be harvested at a later stage. This a great alternative to the conventional composting heaps, and offers a greater selection of beneficial by-products, that can either be sold or utilized by you, this includes the worm castings which is a nutrient filled bacteria rich fertilizer that can be used to enrich soil quality and strengthen plants, as well as a liquid fertilizer or 'worm juice' which is the run off of the tank as plant materials are processed by the worms, and even the worms themselves once the population grows to dense, they can be sold or even simply released into your garden where they will carry on their good work.

In my case the worms I will be using for this is red wrigglers, now doesn't that just have a funky ring to it?

NOTE: I have since added the worms, and I will be doing a follow up post in due time

But until then - happy farming :)