An in-ground worm farm is a great way to compost your food scraps and turn that waste into nourishment for your garden.

Follow the below steps to make a simple, inexpensive in ground worm farm at your home. Don’t worry if you don’t have any worms to add to it initially, just build it and the worms will come!

What you need

• Garden pot or container about 30cm wide (A plastic plant pot 31cm or a 10 litre food grade plastic bucket will do the trick)
• Aged straw or brown leaves
• Soil
• Food scraps
• Compost worms
• Damp straw or cardboard or old brown damp weeds if you have nothing else
• A lid that fits well

Instructions
• Drill 5mm holes into bottom two thirds of container
• Bury it in your garden bed with just top 5 to 10 cm sticking out
• Add a 10cm layer of aged straw or brown leaves and soil
• Place food scraps on top
• Place compost worms on top
• Cap it off with damp straw or cardboard
• Put a lid on top of the pot/bucket to keep rodents and rain out
• When adding more food scraps put more old straw or leaves or cardboard on top to cover food scraps because the food scraps should not be exposed
• Water it if it looks too dry or has ants, it should be moist but not wet

If you are a beginner gardener and you would like to come along to a free Grow some food workshop, please get in touch at thecommunityplate@gmail.com and we can connect you to your nearest workshop location.

For more detailed information on composting with worms have a watch of this home composting webinar from My Smart Garden