4m x 3m Omlet pen, cube, new auto door still boxed and coop light

[Ziggy]

Serious trouble this time...

 

We used to have a wormery made of sealed plastic, in which OH unwisely insisted to pour lots of cooked, wet food, and the whole thing went anaerobic and all the wormies died...

Not one to be easily defeated, I bought another wormery, made of wood, with permanent drainage at the bottom in the form of a grill-type thing (forgive the untechnical terms!!), that has better ventilation. Also bought a book. Did everything absolutely religiously by the book, only adding small amounts at a time, adding some water (which should drain if too much), not putting too much cooked wet food, keeping an eye on things and so on... those worms were like in a hilton for worms... for weeks all went well (except for efficiency, with OH moaning to me that there is no point in having a family-size wormery if we have to be sooooo careful what we put in it), then, all of a sudden, two weeks ago, disaster... everything went slimy and odd... worms gathered together in a slimey mass of unhappy wriggly things... in a panic i added absorbant stuff to the wormery, compostable unused cat litter, and corrugated shredded cardboard, pushing it in to add air and absord slimey dampness...

 

There isn't a single worm left in there... I am hoping they escaped rather than died, as the lid is not sealed, and there are tons of insects left in there looking quite happy, but there are greeny/yellow puddles of toxic looking smelly stuff in there, and I just don't know where I went wrong... I put small amounts at a time, fresh peelings mainly, some cooked food (vegetables as well), bit of egg and rice or pasta, but very small amounts...

 

It's kind of discouraging... I thought wormeries and composting were supposed to be reasonably straightforward, but this is the second time my attempts end up in genocide...

 

Come to think of it all, I'm not doing great with composting either... we have two composters, one that looks like a dalek, and one that is a cylinder which you twirl around to keep things mixed up... the cylinder, despite getting only hemcore and fresh veg waste, is like a pile of muddy, wet clumps that never dry off and smell worse than sewage (guess there is a water tight problem there, but again it has some drainage), and the dalek thing is just one solid mass of extremely damp smelly stuff too, with some waste still fully recognisable after over a year....

 

I read about proportion of waste, try to keep it even, and still all goes wrong...

 

Any suggestion as to what I might have done wrong, or how to improve things, would be greatly appreciated...

 

Oh, and most importantly... once it's got all wrong and you have a mountain of toilet-smelling wet stuff... what on earth do you do with it??

Edited May 19, 2008 by Guest

[SAB]

Apparently adding shredded paper or bits of cardboard, insides of toilt roll, etc helps if compost heap is too soggy due to too many greens - oh, yes and bedding, etc from veggie pets (e.g. hamsters; chickens; rabbits; guineas). Hope this helps

[Couperman]

Everything composts eventually.

 

I had a similar experience yesterday with our wormery, we have had it two years with no problems,

 

Although not a pleasant job we incorporated the contents of the wormery into our compost bins they have almost immediately heated up.

 

The key to composting it seems is getting the recipe right. Lots of nitrogen rich stuff like chicken poo or grass, and lots of carbon based stuff like hemcore, aubiouse or wood chip/sawdust. All you need to do then is turn the heap so that air gets to all of it. I have an aerator which is basically a stick with barbs on that you podge in there and pull back out thus mixing it up.

 

From my experience if you use any kind of carbon rich bedding in the hen run then the mixture is almost always spot on. You just need to make sure it is aerated.

 

Hope this helps and you have my sympathy with the wormies.

 

Kev.

[Ziggy]

Thanks Sab and Kev

 

Everything composts eventually.

 

 

That's what I understood from the articles and books I've read, but at this rate, I'll be composting before my rubbish does!!

Sorry to hear your wormery went wrong too Kev, any idea what happened, if it'd been running fine for 2 years? Did you lose all your worms too?

 

I'll have to re-start the wormery, and tackle the compost heaps with one of those sticks... hopefully with the weather having warmed up the composting process should really get going too...

 

The funny thing is, the composters and wormery go wrong, but the big garden waste pile at the bottom of the garden, that I don't maintain or think twice about, and also throw veg on, always seems to work perfectly fine without fuss... the compost we get from it is great, and it happens fairly quickly...

 

I'll go back to it all and try to concentrate on air, and getting proportions right...

 

Thanks.

[Couperman]

The tap got blocked on our wormery and they all drowned

 

It was a horrible job emptying it

 

I was going to buy a new can o worms type one, but I think I will just get some more worms and start it off again. I will keep a closer eye on it this time.

 

Kev.

[Ziggy]

The tap got blocked on our wormery and they all drowned

 

It was a horrible job emptying it

 

 

Oh no ... I suspect that is partly what went wrong with my own, it has an open 'mesh' type bottom, but I think somehow things got a bit clogged, next time I'll make sure I keep mixing things a bit...

I remember our old plastic one accumulating too much liquid too, and nearly fainting when I opened the tap and had to dispose of jar after jar of the most foul smelling stuff I'd ever come across!!

[Ziggy]

They're not dead!!! To my huge surprise, as I tackled the dreaded emptying of the wormery session, I found that the nasty slimey layer is actually not that deep, and there were still many, many live worms retreated underneath it, just much further down than I had checked when looking for sign of life...

So here's hoping to be able to fix things after all... it was a lovely feeling to find so many of them alive!!

[The Dogmother]

Great news Ziggy - long live the worms!

[ubereglu]

That's good news! We don't have a proper wormery. Just another section to our wooden compost bin where many worms live. For wormeries you need tiger worms, but ours are all earthworms though.