Making a Wormery
Slithery, icky, creepy-crawly worms. Slimy worms. Yuck!
Well, who can blame children for thinking that?
In fact, worms are fascinating. If you study them, you’ll find their behaviour is more complex than you probably ever guessed. Besides, they’re an essential part of the environment - without them, dead plants wouldn’t get turned into compost.

If the thought of making a wormery does not appeal thenyou can buy a ready made one here

Studying them at home is simple enough - all you need to do is make a wormery. All you need is a transparent container, soil and some worms. For this type of wormery, ordinary garden earthworms are fine. If you want to make a wormery to make large quantities of compost for your garden, you’ll need worms sold for the purpose.

To make a Wormery

You could use a large jamjar, but the worms tend to stay in the middle where you can’t see them. Something narrow would be much better. There are commercially made wormeries on the market, but these are expensive, and copying them at home is difficult.

A good compromise is to use an old fish tank. Get a piece of hardboard as long as the tank and as wide as it is deep. Put it into the tank so that it blocks off a narrow section of the tank, and fix it into place using gaffer tape.

Now you can fill your wormery. It’s most interesting to use different coloured soils in layers. Make sure at least some of the soil is rich in compost. It should be slightly damp, but nowhere near waterlogged. You’ll need to add dead leaves, or fresh compost to the top of the wormery from time to time (but see Activities With Your Worms for ways to make this more interesting and educational).

Finding Worms

If you are squeamish about handling worms, it’s probably best to practice when your children aren’t around - the last thing you want is for them to pick up on your nervousness.

All you really need to do to get the worms is dig in the garden (or a park - but you should probably ask a friendly park-keeper first). However, you can make it more interesting by talking about where and when you’d be most likely to find worms - for instance, is it true that worms come out after it rains?

Once you’ve got your worms (you’ll probably want half a dozen or so, depending on the size of your wormery), take the opportunity to have a good look at them. Talk about how long they are, what colour they are, and whether they are the same all the way along.

Activities with Your Worms

Watch the way the soil gets mixed as the worms burrow
Put leaves and other bits of organic material (for instance, bits of potato, orange peel, tea leaves) on the surface of the wormery - what happens to it?

Do the worms prefer one thing over another? 
Look out for worm casts on the surface. Can you work out what is happening?
What happens if you wet the soil?
Some people say they can call worms out of the soil using sounds or music. Can you devise an experiment to see if this is true? How can you make it a fair test?
If you can make more than one wormery, you could do a test to find out which food suits the worms best - which makes them grow most, for instance?
Check the soil for worm capsules - little brown pellets a couple of millimetres long. What do you think these might be? Watch what happens to them in time (to make this easier, put them in a jamjar lined with damp blotting paper - be sure not to let it dry out).
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