How to Start a Worm Farm at Home

1. Choose your worm farm

Any shaded, ventilated container with drainage holes works. The three most popular options:

• Stacking tray farms: easiest to harvest, as worms move up into fresh trays. Great for balconies.
• In-ground worm towers or pods: a tube buried in a garden bed. Low effort, feeds the soil directly.
• DIY tote bin: a 50–70 L opaque storage tub with 1 cm holes drilled in the lid and base. Cheapest way to start.

2. Pick the right spot

Worms need shade, shelter from rain and a steady temperature between 15 and 25 °C. A carport, laundry, shaded side of the house or under a tree is ideal. Never leave a farm in direct afternoon sun — it can cook the worms in an hour.

3. Prepare the bedding

Fill the bottom tray 10–15 cm deep with moist, fluffy bedding: shredded cardboard or newspaper, coconut coir, aged leaves, or a mix. Add a handful of garden soil or sand for grit and some crushed eggshells to balance acidity.

Moisten it until it feels like a wrung-out sponge: damp, but no water drips when squeezed.

4. Add your worms

Start with about 1,000 composting worms (250 g) for a small household, or 2,000 for a family. Spread them on top, cover with a damp hessian sack or a few sheets of wet newspaper, and leave the lid on.

Give them 3–5 days to settle before feeding much. Leaving a light on above the bin for the first night stops wanderers escaping.

5. Feed little and often

Bury food under the bedding in one corner and rotate around the bin. Only add more once most of the last meal has gone. Chopping food small helps worms eat it faster.

• Great: fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, tea bags (plastic-free), crushed eggshells, torn cardboard, pumpkin, melon, banana peel.
• Small amounts: bread, pasta, rice, tomatoes.
• Avoid: meat, fish, dairy, oils, onion, garlic, chilli, large amounts of citrus, pet poo, glossy paper.

Tip: Freeze scraps first. Freezing breaks down cell walls so worms eat them faster, and it kills fruit fly eggs.

6. Troubleshooting

• Smells sour or rotten: overfeeding. Stop feeding for a week and mix in dry shredded cardboard.
• Fruit flies: bury food deeper and keep a damp cover over the bedding.
• Worms crawling up the walls: bedding too wet or acidic. Add dry cardboard and eggshell powder.
• White mites or springtails: harmless, a sign of too much moisture or food.
• Worms slow or disappearing: check temperature. Too hot or too cold is the most common cause.

7. Harvest castings and worm tea

After 2–3 months the bottom tray turns into dark, crumbly castings that smell like forest soil. In a tray farm, start feeding the top tray and worms will migrate up within a few weeks. In a tote bin, push everything to one side and add fresh bedding to the other.

Use castings as a top dressing, mixed into potting mix (around 1 part castings to 4 parts mix), or steep a cupful in a bucket of water overnight to make worm tea. Dilute leachate from the farm tap 1:10 with water before using it on plants.

Common questions