Do wormeries ever work - or are they fated to a biblical foulness?
On the radio last week I was advised to use a wormery to dispose of my organic matter. Really, they are such wonderful things. You buy this shallow bucket within which there are a number of perforated trays. It looks vaguely like a big plastic stove-top steamer. You bung in a load of special worms along with some soil-like stuff and some torn-up bits of newspaper, egg cartons or some such, and then you start throwing in your waste food. No meat, citrus or onions, I think. But everything else goes in, which the worms eat up. And out will come a wonderful compost-type substance, which is perfect for all your gardening needs. So your scraps and stuff, instead of pumping methane out of landfill, will produce tray after tray of matter so nutritious that your plants will stiffen in admiration at the very
sight of it.
If this sounds too good to be true, I
am afraid I have got to tell you I think it probably is. I have now made two concerted but dismally failed attempts at this. It all starts promisingly enough; the worms look eager and ravenous for your celeriac shavings. Then slowly, inexorably, it goes very wrong indeed.
First, the stuff you put in just sits there, so you give it a hopeful stir. Then nothing happens for a while until one day you lift the lid and a squadron of tiny flies rises up in greeting. It will sort itself out, you tell yourself. But sooner or later you end up with a seething, stinking sludge of quite biblical foulness. The worms are dead; the flies have left in disgust, and into landfill the whole lot goes.
I challenge this news organisation to find me one example of a wormery actually working. I want to believe, I really do, but I can’t go for a third attempt without some evidence that it is all not a cruel fantasy.
• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist