How To Make a DIY Worm Tower

Make composting in your garden a speedy affair with your own worm tower by eliminating a few stages in the composting process. Your garden or yard will love you!

Worm TowerA Worm Tower is basically a length of pipe buried halfway in the ground with holes drilled in the buried part for worms to get in and out. Food scraps are added directly to the tower instead of into your composting bin, and are eaten by worms already living in the target part of your yard. You can add Worm Towers to your full blown vermiculture / vermicomposting regime or just use them by themselves, particularly in raised beds. Several steps and lots of time can be eliminated for some of your composting by simply delivering food waste directly to the worms, directly on to the garden.

What you need:

Length of PVC about 3 1/2 inches (89mm) or larger wide or if you can get it a length of bamboo – much more ecological

Something to cap the tube with. (I bought some caps but there are other suggestions like a flipped over plastic pot with some screen to keep out the flies

A saw that can cut through PVC

Drill with large drill bit. I used 1 1/8 inches (30mm) but in the videos looks like they use 1/2 inch (13mm)

Shovel

I had a 9 foot (2.74 metres) length of PVC already, but I did go buy three caps to seal off the top from flies and critters. Before starting this project I was reading about squirrels because several of them like digging in my garden. I was concerned that putting the compost into the garden might be an attraction, and it might, but I did learn that they can only smell about 6-8″ (152-203mm) under the surface of the ground. I took this into consideration when measuring out my pipe hole placement and my notes reflect that. Your results may vary.

Read more: http://www.permaculture.co.uk/readers-solutions/how-make-diy-worm-tower