MAROPENG – With summer right around the corner many avid gardeners are fertilising their plants in readiness for the summer blossoms.
Focusing on greening, Maropeng encourages homeowners to consider introducing a cheaper and more environmentally friendly option – a worm farm. Maropeng’s Maintenance Manager, Robere Brockman says worm farms are a great way to use up your kitchen waste and make high quality soil conditioner or fertiliser called vermicast and a liquid fertilizer called ‘worm tea’.
He says not only is a worm farm easy to make and look after, but it will produce excellent fertiliser for your garden.
Here are some guidelines:
*Worms will eat anything that was once living including left over vegetable scraps; fruit and vegetable peelings; manures (well aged); tea leaves or bags and coffee grounds; torn up newspapers, egg or pizza boxes (soaked
first) and crushed egg shells (this will help the pH balance). Brockman says worms love to eat nearly anything that has ever been alive and is now dead.
*They enjoy fruit and vegetable trimming and peels, banana peels, cornmeal, oatmeal, coffee grounds with the filter, tea bags, rotten and mouldy vegetables, old bread, leftover meals, pet droppings, newspaper, cardboard boxes, dog hair, grass clippings, sugar, etc.
*Chopping these foods up will make it easier for the worms to eat, but is not essential. You might want to keep a plastic container in your refrigerator to hold food scraps so they will be nice and fresh for them. “Don’t let them rot and become smelly but if they are the worms will still eat them,” he says. Worms do not like hot spices, vinegar, citrus fruits or their peelings, oils, dairy products and meat. Brockman says if you want to feed them any of these, only do so in very small quantities and remember the greater the variety of food, the better the castings will be.
Brockman says you can make your own worm farm from various materials, or you can buy a ready-made worm farm from any of the many suppliers that stock them. You will also have to buy your starter stock of worms at the same time.
“Its fun, it’s a great way to get rid of waste and best of all its kind to the earth so why not make this a project in October,” concludes Brockman.
Issued for and on behalf of Maropeng by Cathy Findley PR.
