After about 9 months, our faux compost bin was making excellent progress – the whole thing was teeming with worms and organic matter was breaking down really quickly. We were so encouraged that we decided to take it to the next level and get ourselves a worm farm. Also because the excellent compost was becoming very full and a bit too … juicy.

The relatively inexpensive worm farm we had in 2008/09 had no legs and a drainage tube that dripped worm juice onto the ground. As a work-around, we propped it up on bricks and placed a bowl underneath the tube and it worked well enough, but wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing.

This time we we learned from our experience and spent a little more to get feet and a tap for drainage. And hey, apparently this worm farm is the classy way to compost:

I know I feel totally classy when I’m up to my elbows in decaying vegetables and worm juice.

The packaging also featured these sexy lady worms, getting together for drinks

Imagine my disappointment to discover my worms were not wearing cute outfits. It was like Sea Monkies all over again.

We still retained the faux compost bin and all was going along relatively swimmingly with the worm farm for a couple of months, though surprisingly not such rapid breakdown of the newly added organic matter as with the bin. At the end of the holiday I decided to attend to worm-farm … ermmm … farming and use the worm juice to fertilise the plants on the lower balcony.

I put a small (about a litre capacity) watering can underneath and Don turned on the tap. Worm juice (ewwww) gushed out … and out … and out … and the tap could not be turned off. So we put one small plant pot after another under the tap and still the worm juice (ewww) kept gushing. Then I raced up to the laundry to grab a large bucket – and we knew we had a problem when the bucket was filling rapidly. We lifted the trays to look at the worm juice reservoir and it was absolutely brimming.

Oh! The running! The shrieking! The buckets! The laughter! It was all like some horrible slapstick.

There ended up being about 20 litres of worm juice (ewwww). The garden was amply fertilised as was the grass on the nature strip.

Lesson learned to purge a little more frequently.