Worm Condo = Garden Bling = Bird Bath

Several months ago we started to compost in our little backyard garden.

I really wanted a worm condo, but with my kid’s obsession for worms and a variety of other practical reasons, having the worm condo inside, didn’t seem like a good idea!

And around here it is HOT a lot of the time, so simply putting it on the patio would have cooked the worms too.

It seemed that the most logical thing was to have the worms and their precious castings right where we wanted them the most - in our veggie beds!

 

 

 

So, I decided to have an in-bed worm condo that we can feed the worms little scraps here and there while they would be able to go to ground, when it got too hot or too cold.

 

 

It was really easy to do and you can customize it any way you like!

I had photographs of the process (which isn’t really complicated) but for some reason they have disappeared from my camera! So, I will describe it to you as best I can!

I got a large 3 ft. PVC riser pipe from Home Depot.

I measured out about 10 inches from one side and marked it all the way around.

Then I drilled some holes with a 1/2 inch bit randomly all over that 10 inch space. This is the part that will be buried underground and the holes give the worms access to the scraps.

Now, you could be done. Just dig a 10 inch deep hole in your garden, lower the pipe into it, fill the hole back up with soil and your worm condo is in place.

Find something like a little bucket, or a bowl etc. that would serve as a lid and you have the basics in place.

 

 

To make your worm condo work, you now need to add a few things to the inside, to either attract worms, or if you purchased some, to give them a nice home.

First of all, water the inside of the condo. Worms like it nice and moist. Then add a layer of compost. Just drop it in there!

Then follow that with some shredded paper or some kind of other bedding, like coco coir. Water that a little too.

Then add some kitchen scraps. They love fruit and veggie peelings, coffee grounds, the odd egg shell and such lovely things. NO meat, grains or dairy however, and I also don’t tend to feed them citrus fruit or any cooked food scraps.

Then empty your box of bought worms on top of it. They usually have soil and castings in the box of your bought worms already, so that should be fine as the top layer.

Place your lid over the top and let the wigglers do their thing!

Depending on how many worms you have, give them a hand full of scraps every day or so to keep them happy. My kids LOVE feeding the worms!

 

Of course, having this blank canvas of a pipe just sitting there, had me think up all sort of things to decorate it. In the end I wanted to dive into my box of old tiny tiles, scraps of glass, broken mirrors and glass pebbles that I have sitting in my craft room.

If you don’t have a stash - try ebay. You can get lots of leftover mosaic tiles fairly inexpensively!

It was just a matter of nipping the glass bits to shape, gluing them on in a pattern I liked and letting it all dry.

 

 

Then I used a basic sanded grout in grey to grout in between the tiles and letting it dry a bit. Then I cleaned off the excess grout, polished it all and finished with a couple of coats of outdoor grout sealer.

 

 

And there it is - the worm condo that’s doubling as garden bling.

Now, if you really wanted to go all out, you could even make this do triple duty and turn it into a bird bath.

All you need to do is use a footed bowl as your “lid” and fill it with water!

 

 

I picked this one up quite inexpensively at a thrift store.

 

 

You could also use one of those large clay saucers that come with terracotta pots, continue your mosaic on the inside and outside of that plate and have a totally fabulous mosaic bird bath/worm condo!

 

For the kids it’s easier to handle the bowl, so we’re sticking with that.