What is Composting?
Composting is the natural process that turns organic waste from the kitchen, home and garden into a valuable fertiliser that will really benefit your garden. It's nature’s way of recycling its bounty. Composting returns anything that has lived and died back into the earth; producing the material which plays an essential role in maintaining a healthy soil.
Although composting occurs naturally in the garden, adding extra compost to your garden by recycling your kitchen and garden waste can improve the structure of the soil and help feed the life in the soil.
WigglyWigglers are here to help you start composting or, if you’re already a convert, keep you composting at peak efficiency.
We have everything you’ll need to recycle all your household organic waste from Wormeries to handle your kitchen waste to an extensive range of composters designed to handle large quantities of garden waste. We also have a handy helpline to guide you if you have a problem and stock a terrific selection of books on all aspects of composting and natural gardening, including many that you won’t find in your local bookstore.
Why should I compost?
Compost, as all gardeners know, brings fertility to the earth - it improves structure, holds water yet improves drainage, breaks up clays yet binds sands; it is one of the essential building blocks of good soil. Some 60% of all household waste is organic and can be recycled. If you just ‘throw away’ this waste you are adding to the millions of tonnes per year that is simply left to rot in landfill. As this waste decomposes its potential value is lost forever, whilst pollutants escape into the air and seep into the water.
What should I compost?
Anything that has lived and died can be composted, including kitchen waste such as vegetable peelings and leftover food scraps; garden waste such as prunings and lawn clippings; animal waste such as horse manure; even dust from your vacuum and packaging waste such as cardboard eggboxes and the centres from your toilet and kitchen rolls!
Where should I compost?
Different places for different wastes... one of our efficient wormeries (like a Worm Cafe) by the kitchen door will take care of the household waste while a conventional compost heap in the garden will handle the garden waste. Our wormeries use the power of worms to accelerate the composting process, but garden heaps can also be enriched with composting worms to turbo charge their performance.
Why should I compost with Worms?
1) Worms compost quickly: they are the fastest natural composters by far. The fact that they eat up to half their own body weight in waste everyday makes them very efficient at clearing waste. They also reduce the volume of your waste: something like 8-10 bins of waste will probably be reduced to 1 bin of compost. Having eaten the waste they leave behind a top quality compost called worm-casts. Worm-casts are known as 'Black Gold' by experienced gardeners, they comprise a rich, dark material which is friable and pleasant to handle. As a further benefit the worms will also produce many litres of a fertilising liquid which, if you’re using a wormery, can be collected from the tap. When diluted 1:10 with water this can be used as a general purpose plant feed.
2) Worms can compost effectively in a very small space (even indoors). A top quality wormery like our Worm Cafe measures just 760mm tall, 560mm wide and 385mm deep, so it can be kept almost anywhere.
3) Worms stop smells-they work on the micro-organisms which cause odours.
Are the worms used to compost waste safe?
Yes. All our worms are from British native species. They are safe, hygienic and completely natural. If any do stray from your composter they will live happily with your other garden worms.
