How to Make A Wormery

Materials

• 2 litre plastic drinks bottle
• plant pot filled with soil or compost
• black paper, cardboard or material
• crushed chalk - school chalk will do (or pea gravel can be used instead)
• sand
• soil or compost
• dead leaves
• earthworms
• a marker pen.

Instructions

• Cut the top and bottom off the plastic bottle, leaving a tall cylinder.
• Put about 10 earthworms into the soil in the plant pot.
• Place the cylinder made from the bottle on top of the soil and fill it with alternate layers of soil, crushed chalk and/or gravel if you are using it. (The chalk and< gravel layers need only be thin.)
• Mark the levels of the layers of soil, sand and chalk/gravel on the cylinder with the marker.
• Place some dead leaves on top � preferably broken up into smallish pieces.
• Cover the cylinder with the black paper, cardboard or material to keep out the light.
• Keep everything damp � not wet � and leave for several days. Lift the cover and observe what has happened.

Notes

There should be roughly 85 per cent soil and 15 per cent other materials in the wormery. The wormery needs to be kept somewhere cool and once set up can be left for one or two weeks. If you leave it any longer than this, the worms are in danger of dying. The worms can be released where they were caught. After another week or so, the wormery can be set up again.

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