Worm farm review - What one is best?
Written by Leo Murray, Why Waste founder. Oct 2021.
“What worm farm should I buy?”, is a question we get asked a lot. This article will help you decide which is the best worm farm for you as we review the different worm farm options from our experience of what works and doesn’t work.
Spoiler Alert: The Hungry Bin is the best worm farm.
There’s a few things to consider when buying a worm farm to suit your needs.
Have a think about:
How much space do you have?
What price are you willing to pay?
How much time do you have to spend?
To what degree are you willing to prioritise worm farming over other creative or outdoor projects?
Let’s take a look at your options.
Reviewing worm farm options
Worms-R-Us
The first worm farm I got was the Worms-R-Us worm farm ($108).
The worm population thrived, and the seeds of Why Waste were planted in the fertile soil that I harvested from this worm farm. This cheap and cheerful option can do the job, but it’s limitations lie within its small size, average build quality, and tiered design.
The tiered design means that the worm farm is in different removable sections. You start with one, and as the layers fill up more layers are added - while the worms can travel up and down between them. In general, the bottom layer is the most mature/processed while the top layer is where the most worms are because that's where you add your fresh scraps to.
The downside to tiers is that it’s heavy, messy, and can be quite time consuming. A degree of knowledge is involved, and lifting trays full of soil may be prohibitive for some folks.
VermiHut
The Tauranga City Council supplies the VermiHut to folks who do their worm farming workshop. For locals, these workshops are a great way to build capacity for the community to transform waste into a resource. However, the stack of VermiHuts I have strewn out the back of my wormshed demonstrates that TCC aren’t quite nailing it. Folks usually try it for 6 months or a year and then call Why Waste to join our worm farm subscription.
The reason I’ve included the VermiHut is to identify two main factors to watch out for - size and build quality. Not only is it too small to cater for a family that eats well, it also feels thin and flimsy. It’s common for these to change colour in the sun after just one summer.
All plastics photodegrade (degradation by light) in the sun. When this happens in a short period of time this indicates that the quality of the plastic is pretty poor. In the pursuit for minimising waste, the last thing we need is more crap plastic. Quality of quantity is my recommendation, which kinda rules out the first two worm farms on our list.
Worm Cafe and Tui Worm Farm
You can buy the Worm Cafe off the shelf ($98 at Bunnings), and you can find Tui’s equivalent at Mitre10 for the same price. I haven’t tried these, and I don’t plan to. They appear quite small, and only have two layers. Most folks I know would fill these up before the worms get a chance to eat the waste. If I were to choose between them, the Tui Worm Farm is more solid than the Tumbleweed Worm Cafe, but neither would suit a household of more than one or two.
Can-o-Worms
Of all the multi-tiered designs, the Tumbleweed Can-o-Worms can process the largest amount of waste, and is the most durable. The ‘world's best selling worm farm’ according to their website, which also claims that the legs are ‘well-designed’. I found this ironic given the amount of these units I’ve seen without some or any legs attached. But even that's ok, there’s something kinda fitting about a worm farm chilling on a few bricks! Bunnings sells Can-o-Worms for $99.
The potential population of a worm farm is confined by the surface area available (worms gotta breathe!). Tiger worms can eat their own weight a day, so the more worms your surface area allows, the more waste you can process.
The Worms-R-Us is slightly bigger than the VermiHut, Worm Cafe and Tui Worm Farm, and the Can-o-Worms is bigger again.
In-Ground Worm Farms
Bunnings have two worm farms that are buried within the ground. The idea is that the worms break down the waste and then distribute the castings out into your garden through the holes in the unit. I love the idea, though I’ve found them to be quite limited in capacity. I chalk this up to their super limited surface area, so you could totally buy multiples (you’d need one for every day of the week to match the Hungry Bin’s capacity).
The Subpod is an in-ground worm farm out of Australia that seems to be getting traction. I haven’t seen one yet, but I love the design given it’s wide and shallow (cos you know how much I love surface area!). One drawback is that they are harder to service/clean out being in the ground. You can get them for $349 from Gubba, which seems a bit pricey for a flat-packed series of plastic sheets that clip together.
Hungry Bin
You can buy Hungry Bins direct for $325, or pick them up at Mitre10 for $359
This worm farm is designed and manufactured in New Zealand by a kiwi fella called Ben Bell. He’s done away with the heavy layers by making a tapered chute that flows from top to bottom, so right off the bat the Hungry Bin is much easier to use. It has a large surface area, allowing for up to 2 kilos of worms to live and processing up to 2 kilos of waste per day.
The Hungry Bin has some other sweet design features like wheels for moving, steel legs that stop rodents, as well as the tapered shape I mentioned above. This compacts the castings as they move through the unit, encouraging the worms to stay higher up (also where the food and oxygen is) resulting in worm free castings when you harvest them from the clip tray at the bottom.
You might recognise the Hungry Bin from our Why Waste platforms. As this is the worm farm, we use it for our worm farm subscription service. The reason we use the Hungry Bin is pretty straightforward - quality and circular economics. If I’m going to own hundreds of units of any product and offer it as a service, it has to be the best possible quality, otherwise I’m making work for myself. It also has to be modular, with each part replaceable and recyclable.
When something breaks I disassemble it, send the problem back to get melted down and turned back into worm farm parts again. This is how all consumable goods will work in a thriving future on a living planet. While we’re over here making sure all the biodegradable waste remains in the biosphere, the circular economy ensures that the materials we’ve removed from the biosphere remain in the technosphere.
Choosing a worm farm subscription over buying your own
You may be the kind of person who doesn’t have much time to spend worm farming, doesn’t want to learn how and would rather prioritise other projects. If that sounds like you then choosing a worm farm subscription over buying your own might be the best option for you.
You still get the benefits of diverting organic waste from landfill and creating nutrient dense fertiliser, but we take all the hassle out of it for you.
Some of the reasons why people love the subscription are:
No additional time on installation.
No additional costs of buying worms.
No additional costs of buying bedding.
No hassle of understanding where to put it.
No hassle of learning how to maintain it.
No nasty smells.
No potential disasters caused from incorrect feeding, out of balance pH or moisture levels.
No additional costs of replacement parts.