How much water should you give your worm farm and what do you do with the excess run-off?

This is a tricky situation. You want the contents moist like a wrung-out sponge. Too wet can cause the worms to drown and if too dry the worms will dry up and die. When I had my first wooden worm farm, this was a hard balance for me, I think because the wood trays were porous and small so things dried out quickly.

Excess fluid from worm farm

It is suggested to flush your worm farm with water each week and allow the over flow to run into a bucket that can be used to water and fertilize your garden. My instructions that came with the existing worm farm said to flush it with 1 gallon of water each week. This turned out to be a mistake and the worms were trying to escape into the collector tray. The company told me to stop watering for about 3-4 weeks and see how that did.

Even to this day, the contents are very wet and giving me several cups of worm tea in the bucket each week without even flushing it with water. The reason I’m getting worm tea without flushing with water is from the moisture content in the veggies that I’m feeding the worms. This will vary with your worm farm too. There is no exact measurement of water that you can consistently rely on each week. I have gone years now without adding any water and the other master gardener who I keep referring to told me she never adds additional water either.

You can leave your spigot open or closed. Some people leave it open all the time and just allow the worm tea to pour into the bucket when there is overflow. This keeps the collector tray from filling up too much and drowning any worms that may be in there. Whatever you decide to do, you might consider putting a strainer on top of the bucket because the worms do come out through the spigot and have drowned in my worm tea. By doing this, I can catch them as they come out and put them back into the worm farm.

Add a strainer to catch worms from drowning

The worm tea coming out of the spigot and into your bucket can be mixed with water at a ratio of 10:1 – to clarify, the water is the 10 and the tea is the 1 - and watered directly onto your garden or potted plants. This will not burn or harm your plants.

I will address our summer heat in the next topic.

The next topics covered later are “What temperatures can the worms tolerate?” and “When should you add the next tray?”

For previous topics, please visit these blogs: To view the first blog topic "Raising a worm farm and harvesting worm castings" - click here: https://www.peasbeewithewe.net/post/raising-a-worm-farm-and-harvesting-worm-castings To view the second blog topic “What kind of worm farm should you start with?” – click here: https://www.peasbeewithewe.net/post/what-kind-of-worm-farm-should-you-start-with To view the third blog topic "How to begin the first tray of your worm farm" - click here: https://www.peasbeewithewe.net/post/how-to-begin-the-first-tray-of-your-worm-farm To view the fourth blog topic "How many worms should you get and what kind?" - click here:

https://www.peasbeewithewe.net/post/how-many-worms-should-you-get-in-a-worm-farm-and-what-kind

To view the fifth blog topic "How much should you feed, what should you feed, and how often should you feed the worms?" - click here: https://www.peasbeewithewe.net/post/how-much-should-you-feed-what-should-you-feed-the-worm-farm-and-how-often-do-you-feed-the-worms

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