Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey
Currently i have three small systems up and running. All three are different so i can see which large system i will end up designing. Anyway one of the things i want to do was to start a worm farm to help feed the SP i plan to get in the future. I found this web page which a bathtub is turned into a worm farm. My question is has anyone made a similar worm farm. I don’t want to waste the only bath tube i have which could be used in another AP system.
The link is as followed. http://www.thebegavalley.org.au/fileadm ... M_FARM.pdf
Cheers

Compost worms can live in you GB's. If your getting silvers I'd also look into duckweed and BSF.

12 bath tubs being used as worm farms at Ceres in Mel

i have a worm farm made of an old cast iron bath. It was too heavy to incorporate into a grow bed. I placed a 75mm layer of sand in the bottom and then added worms from a mates wf. That was four years ago, we now have thousands of worms. there is a container under the outlet and the juice is collected and i dilute it and feed it to my orchids. I put cotton, hessian or similar on top and the hole bath is covered with a piece of sheet metal to keep out water.
Pete

Hey
Thanks for the replies.
I’m currently looking into different ways to keep the cost of food, power and materials down. Looking at the photo of 12 bathtubs and Bluefin has convinced me to hack into the one I’ve got.
I plan to mix up the feed abit duckweed, worms etc which i hope will not be a problem. I’m still gathering as much information from the forums as possible.
So thanks for the replies

I'd save the bath for use with AP or something. You can make a worm bin out of just about anything and I have two built of wood that are great because the breath a bit naturally without needing holes cut all over them. And yes, grow beds make good worm habitat too. I found that a handy way to harvest some worms from a grow bed is to place a plant pot with some moist compost on top of the gravel, when I up ended the flower pot, I found a load of worms in the bottom, this works if your grow bed is heavily populated by worms.

Here is a pic of one of my worm bins.

they should be kept completely shaded as sun on a worm bin can cook away your moisture and cause your worms to leave.
I like having a bin with legs so I can place the feet in containers of mineral oil or water to keep ants from climbing up into my bins. Ants love to make nests in worm bins and our ants here bite making it very painful to harvest worms out of a bin that has been infested by ants. I believe all worm bins should have legs or be on stands that have legs that can be placed in containers of mineral oil (mineral oil is nice since it won't evaporate nearly as fast as water and it won't breed mosquitos the way a dish of water can.)

Nice one
What type of lid is that, netting, perspex etc.?

The lid on my worm farm is simply wood framed fly screen with a little bit of chain link laying over it because the cat kept trying to sleep on it.