Today I was going out to feed my worm farm, and:

1. There was a large brown cockroach crawling around on top of the newspaper. Considering how much I hate cockroaches, I didn’t dare lift up the newspaper to see how many were underneath.

2. There was mold all over the farm.

A short google search later, I found some answers.

Buy Organic had a great post with comments like:

You might have a lot of cockroaches as your compost is too acidic. Try adding water and lime and see how that goes.

And some good tips plus a few smart arse comments on the ABC Gardening Australia forum.

There was also this long and detailed article on Gardening by Mistake for anyone who wants to explore the wonderful world of a worm farm ecosystem.

As well as a funny post on how worm farms can stand a fair bit of neglect.

But my favourite has to be this great selection of posts from Small Farms. They had good, simple advice about the mold:

Now, if you have mold growing on the INSIDE of the container you’re doing one thing wrong – feeding the worms too much. While a worm can eat its weight in food each day, this doesn’t mean they can eat as much organic waste as you can produce every day. When mold appears, remove the excess food, especially the mold covered pieces from the worm housing or the mold will spread. Replace the food with fresh food, only in a smaller quantity. After a while, you’ll get a feel for how much the worms will eat on any given day.

Yikes. That means I have to:

  1. Throw all the food I’ve painstakingly collected away.
  2. Pick out all the moldy bits.
  3. Crush all the cockroaches (With a spoon? Like Gardening By Mistake did? Yeurgh… I might leave the cockroach crushing till Pete gets back.)
  4. Or leave the cockroaches alone and …
  5. spread some lime over the worm farm,
  6. and water it in to keep it all moist.

I think I’ll try No 1, 5 & 6. Not sure I want to lift the newspaper, so maybe I’ll get a nice obliging person who is not cockroach phobic to do it for me.

Any volunteers? Or any other tips?

In the meantime, I’ll keep you guys posted when I can stomach opening the farm again to look.

My other posts on worm farming.