The wormery was set up last year in 2010 following the instructions and then putting a bag of worms into the wormery and we were surprised at the time it took for the kitchen waste and paper to rot down to start with and produce liquid. It took months for it to really get into action after putting in several layers of material from our kitchen compost caddy.

When it got going, the wormery presented a problem by attracting a lot of flies because of putting stuff from the caddy that didn’t rot down quick enough. This was remedied by putting in some lime mix granules that added acidity to the soil and also putting plenty of shredded paper (dry carbon material) into it. Because the wormery has a hole mesh on the bottom of each tier, a lot of worms found their way into the water containing base and drowned. This went on for several months until we could take the bottom layer out and put a new one on top. The worms then all went upwards and stopped drowning in liquid!

The wormery is now working nicely, doesn’t attract so many flies and is a valuable way of dealing with kitchen waste that you can’t put anywhere else. It does take a certain amount of maintenance, but no where near as much as it did to start with, requiring some patience in the beginning to get it going. A wormery is ideal for use in a workplace.