Stephanie, composter and worm farmer, Dulwich Hill

We visited Stephanie and her family in her house in Dulwich Hill and  asked her to tell her composting and worm farming story. 

Stephanie is a long time composter and worm farmer. She loves the nutrient rich compost and worm juice she gets and finds small additions of either grass or newspaper can help keep her worm farm happy.

"I’ve got a compost and a worm farm so what I normally do is I just divide it up. The worms don’t really need that much food. I use it mainly so I get the worm juice for the garden and the plants. I call them my 1000 pets.

I’ve had a worm farm for twenty years and a compost bin for about 12 years now since I had a house. This one is only 3 years old. I do like the ones that are closed off because you don’t get the cockroaches crawling in and out. The compost tumbler is a divided one so I can have one rotting and the other one I can fill up in that time. The worm farm doesn’t really need a lot of work or a lot of food scraps. I’ve got a container in the kitchen where we put our food scraps. We only really put in vegetable and fruit leftovers. I don’t put in any meat in there. I don’t really even put any bread in. You have to be careful. You can’t have any citrus or onions. 

If it smells odd then either I’ll put some grass in or I put some newspaper in if it is too wet. It’s no work at all and it takes so much of our household waste. We’ve got one of the small red bins and we only fill it half maximum a week. 

I want to reduce waste and it’s such a great nutrient, my plants go wild when they get the worm juice and I use the compost for my little veggie garden. It’s great, it’s no work, it’s very easy.

All my friends love my worm juice. I often go around with little bottles and they use it for their plants and the kids love it because it’s a good story that we have a worm farm and 1000 worms.1000 pets.

I leave the tap on the worm farm open in case it rains so they don’t drown. That’s why I’ve got the bottle there constantly. I’ve drowned some, not a complete batch but I had to restock. I had the tap closed and we were away for the week and it rained really heavily and it just filled up. But the frying one that was the funniest one. That was in a unit and I was away and I think it was north facing and you could see the worms trying to escape. They were baked on to the sides. "