WHILE other farmers in the Far West have been doing it tough this winter, the farm at Broken Hill PCYC is expanding.
Already knee-deep in goat and chicken husbandry, children’s activity co-ordinator Ali Baiton has decided to have a crack at farming worms.
“Our over-arching curriculum for after-school care is sustainability,” Ms Baiton said.
“So we were coming up with ideas and it was one the kids who suggested that we start a worm farm.”
The idea is to teach children that food isn’t simply manufactured at the supermarket.
“We plan on starting up garden beds for the kids, so they can grow vegetables, use the worm compost to fertilise them, and then eat them. That’s the plan,” Ms Baiton said.
And it’s foolproof, provided the PCYC has plenty of the two key ingredients required for vermicomposting: worms and plenty of leftovers.
“They eat food and vegetable scraps, as well as paper waste and cardboard, because they need a carbon source as well,” Ms Baiton explained.
“We’ve done lots of learning about worms and what they can and can’t have. Anything what we can’t give to the worms, we give to the chickens.
“But we definitely still need worms,” she insisted. “I’ve got one box from a kid and it had 15 worms in it, so that’s a great start. But your average worm farm should have about a thousand worms.”
That’s one huge head count of required stock, and one might expect this farm to be enormous, when in fact it’s quite compact.
“It’s not that big, probably just 60 by 90 centimetres,” said Ms Baiton.
“It’s got three layers to it – you can’t see the worms from the outside, but if you open up the lid you can. It’s pretty fancy.”
Ms Baiton said anyone with worms to donate can drop in to the PCYC in Gypsum Street between 9am and 9pm, where somebody will know what to do with the cargo.
As for responsible sourcing of the worms, Ms Baiton is unaware of any restrictions on worm catchers.
“I haven’t really looked into that side of things,” she said. “I’ve kind of just relied on other people giving me worms from their worm farms that they already have.
“I don’t really have any opposition to people getting worms from the ground.
“I just don’t myself feel like digging through the Broken Hill dirt for worms.”
