Worm Farm in a Bath

I wanted a worm farm that would be cheap, easy to look after & give me lots of the good stuff - worm tea plus vermicasts.

I looked around on the internet and decided to put one in an old bath.

Here's what I used:

• An old Bath
• Scraps of wood to make a frame. You could use concrete blocks for this. It's important to have it high enough to be able to put a container underneath the plug hole to collect the tea.
• stones for drainage
• A lid. Corrugated iron or an old piece of ply will do.
• A liner. I used permeable weed mat, non-woven kind
• Straw
• Compost
• Food - vegetable scraps
• Old sacks or newspapers torn into strips for a top layer
• Worms - about 1 litre of them

•  Build a basic frame for the bath. I wanted to be able to work at it without bending over & putting my back out, and use it as a potting bench as well, so made it reasonably high. 
• Put it in a spot which is not going to fry in summer or freeze in winter. Mine is on the south (non-sunny) side of a garage. It's in a courtyard with white gravel which keeps the temperature quite even.
• It will become quite heavy so you don't want to have to move it around after it's set up.
• In winter I will cover it with an old blanket as extra insulation.

 I had a collection of stones from out of the vegie garden so this was a great way to use them.They are for drainage and will allow all the worm tea to percolate down to the plug hole.

Next weed mat to stop the worms & composting material from clogging up the stones

Straw goes in next, as a base material for aeration & bedding for the worms. You could also use torn up newspapers. Wet this layer thoroughly.

2 wheelbarrows full of not-quite-ready compost went in next (that's all I had, you could use finished compost as well) with some fresh food scraps mixed in to the top layer.

The essential ingredient, worms! You can buy these online. Make sure they are actual compost worms.

A protective layer, to keep the contents damp. You could use hemp sacks, I used damp, shredded newspapers.

And there it is! I've got an old piece of ply on top. We drilled holes in it to allow air to circulate. You could also use corrugated iron, which would repel the  rain better, which I will keep an eye out for, but don't want to go and buy some especially. I have to put another piece on top when it rains, as too much water goes into the bath. You also need some sort of container under the plug hole to catch the tea.

To use the tea, mix it 1 part tea to 10 parts water, or it will be too strong for your plants. They will absolutely love it, it's a real tonic for them, especially potted plants.

Notes:

• Feed the worms a 2 litre container of scraps every week or so. Note that it may take a couple of weeks for the worms to start work. They need to get acclimatised first. 
• Keep an eye on how fast they eat the food, you may need to feed more or less. Remove any food that goes mouldy and put it in the compost.
• Concentrate on feeding one end of the bath at a time, and when it's full (up to a year), feed at the other end. The worms will move down there, and you will be able to harvest the casts (worm poo) from the original end after a week or so. Take it out carefully with your hands so you don't take any worms as well, and refill that end with compost. 
• Use the vermicasts as a component of home-made potting mix (1:1:1 Vermicasts : Sand : Mature compost) or sprinkle it around plants as plant food.

There it is. If you have a go, & please let me know how yours turns out & anything you did differently!

DIY Mini Shade House or Greenhouse

Around Kirwee, there are a lot of cropping farms, and we get a huge number of white butterflies. If you want to grow brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli etc), you need to either use a lot of derris dust, or protect the plants with some kind of barrier.

I spent a lot of effort growing my seedlings from seed & really don't want to use any kind of chemical input. Derris dust kills everything it comes into contact with, including bees, so thats another reason.

Bought tunnel houses can be pretty expensive, so I decided to build my own. My husband is an electrician, so I had access to some conduit tubing, which is ideal. The question was how to put it together & stick it in in the ground. I came up with the idea of using reo (reinforcing steel). My idea was to use shortish lengths stuck into the ground with enough length above ground to put the conduit over it. I got a 6 metre length of reo from the hardware store, smiled sweetly at the big strong men & they cut it up for me into 8 x 750mm lengths (no charge!). I figured that 4 conduit tubes along each side of my 4.5metre beds would be about right. Then I needed an additional length which would be the centre pole & go the whole length of the frame.
Here are the pictures of how I put it together.

 

 Cutting the 6 metre length of reo into 8 equal parts means they are 750mm each. I worked it out in my head, but the big strong hardware men had to get a calculater... Here I've stuck it into the ground. I didn't do it right into the corner because I thought it might get a little loose against the wooden sides.

Here it is with the conduit on top of it. The curve of the conduit against the strength of the reo holds it on really tight. You need a bit of muscle to bend the conduit over to the reo on the other side.

I used 2 x T conduit connections, one at each end to hold the centre piece firmly. It didn't want to slide on very easily, but we got there with a few gentle taps with a hammer.

Where the centre piece meets the 2 inside struts I used electrical cable ties. I should have made sure the little connection piece was on the underside, but covered it over with insulation tape so it wouldn't catch on the shade netting & tear it.

Now the frame's finished and ready for the cover. I bought this at the hardware store too.

I love it, & love seeing those ratbag white butterflies trying to get in! When I want to get into it I use clothes pegs to lift up the end or side so I can work in it. It's really cosy inside, and I think the temperature is a little warmer in there too.

It's autumn now, so I think it will help ripen the tomatoes & peppers. It doesn't seem to have been a very good summer this year, so hopefully my shade house will help extend the season. This is the second frame I've built like this, the first one is 2 years old I've had no problems with it. I covered that one with a sheet of plastic to make a small greenhouse (again from the hardware store). It's great for growing lettuces & other salad vegies in the colder season & to get an early start in spring.

The great thing about these frames is that since I have 4 beds of identical size, I can easily dismantle and reassemble them over whichever bed I need them on, following my rotation system.

Chickens

I've always wanted laying hens but didn't have enough space when we lived in town. I've come to realise now that we really didn't need that much space. Here's what I did... To start with, we only had 2 hens, brown shavers, bred to lay almost daily. They were lovely & friendly.

We got 2 kittens about the same time who thought the hens were very interesting and they practiced stalking them, but the hens would give them a sharp peck if they got too close.

We built a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is an enclosed run that will fit neatly on your garden beds. The hens lived in it and it really was just like a mini tractor. They turn over the soil, eating bugs, weeds and remnants of plants, while depositing their manure and giving you eggs. Its a win win!

(This is not the hens)

We throw kitchen scraps in with them, plus garden waste, and they love to dig it over! The kittens love to watch the action. It's made of scraps of electrical conduit, a tarpaulin and some cable ties. (Hubby is an electrician, but you can get these from any electrical supplier) We made it to fit exactly onto one half of the long beds. It worked so well!

 Sometimes we put it on the lawn, but not for more than 2 days in the same place or they'll dig holes.
 
Unfortunately a neighbours dog got in while we were out. They can be really vicious. I was gutted, but hooked on poultry, so decided to start again, and bought a hen with 8 chicks online. They were so cute! But they wouldn't all fit in the tractor once they got big, so we decided to fence off the orchard area for them. If you keep poultry in your orchard, they will eat the fallen fruit, plus dig for the codling moth larvae and other bad guys which live underground. Needless to say, they will also fertilise the orchard & give you eggs! If I was a hen, I'd like to live here :)

We used 2 metre high standards & 2 rolls of 1 metre wire (originally thought that 1 metre high would be enough, but after the dog incident decided to go higher. We should have bought 2 metre wire!) We were lucky to have a small child's playhouse in the orchard already, so put in a couple of perches and added 2 nesting boxes plus wood shavings on the floor. Perfect!

The chicks soon grew, and got bigger than their mum. 3 of the 8 chicks turned out to be boys and  unfortunately we aren't allowed to have roosters in our area, so they had to go. We got 2 more brown shavers as we weren't sure how the chicks would go at laying as they were all bitsers. It was wonderful, like a real farmyard! The chicken tractor is in there at the moment, as we put any broodies in there to keep them out of the nesting boxes and keep their body temperatures down so they get over it quickly, plus the vegie garden is full of vegies at the moment.

We had a massive storm last October, which took out a couple of trees, and one of our brown shavers must have had a heart attack as she was dead under her perch the next morning. It's sad when these things happen, but you move on! Our latest thing is that our favourite hen, Maude, went broody, so we put her in the tractor with some fake eggs to sit on. After a couple of weeks (should really be 21 days, but she didn't seem to mind...) we took the fake eggs away and put in 5 x day old chicks. She was over the moon! Unfortunately the chicks didn't know what to do. A real problem as it was going to be a cold night. So our solution was to put some wood shavings in a bird cage, put the chicks in, then put Maude on top. We covered them over with a blanket, and left them to it for the night.

Phew! They soon got the message that this was 'Mum', and she would keep them warm, and they've been happily living in the chicken tractor with her ever since.

You can see in the pictures that the orchard is no longer the lush green area it once was. Poultry and pretty lawns don't go together I'm afraid. I've just had to come to terms with that, and we've now fenced the orchard into 2 areas, which we will alternate them in, for 6 weeks or so in each so that it has a chance to recover!