Wormery?

I'm Interested in peoples views regards a good idea or not?

Moved to Compost corner!!
I've never had much luck with wormeries.

Well I loved mine but the bin eventually got a leak. It was the "original" worm bin. I liked that it kept the kitchen waste separate from my harden waste - rats were always after peelings especially, fruit stuff.

I never really got much "compost" from it but I used the feed for my tomatoes. I kept it by my kitchen door and just emptied my veg stuff in there with egg shells and small bits of card. I liked seeing the worms too

I've tried twice. First with one of the wormeries that's the size of a wheelie bin - the Council had a special offer on them so I got carried away.
There was a grid at the bottom and a tap below for the worm juice - no tiers. Being a little short arse. I couldn't reach inside the bin to the bottom and almost fell in! The thought of upending myself in a wormery, little legs kicking out the top and worms invading my hair, was too much, so I gave up on it.
Then I saw a special offer for one of the tiered ones - so special I bought two, one for here and one for down west. I failed to get anything usable as compost or worm juice from either.
I'm getting lots of "juice" from Mr Greedy though.

I have a wormery but it's only for suitable sized worms used for fishing!  Its just a large plastic contaner which I put worms into so that when i go fishing I only have to tip it out, grab as many worms as I need then put the soil and the rest of the back in. To save it getting flooded I usually put a wooden board over it and mix a few half decayed cabbage leaves in with the compost to keep the remaining worms happy.

Not what you were meaning I know, but that's my take on it!

I have a wormery but it's only for suitable sized worms used for fishing!  Its just a large plastic contaner which I put worms into so that when i go fishing I only have to tip it out, grab as many worms as I need then put the soil and the rest of the back in. To save it getting flooded I usually put a wooden board over it and mix a few half decayed cabbage leaves in with the compost to keep the remaining worms happy.

Not what you were meaning I know, but that's my take on it!

Not what I was meaning at all but made me laugh

My wormery has been residing with my parents for the last 16 months and my mother makes a slightly worried "hmm" noise every time I ask if it's okay. I think she's let it get a bit wet and fruit-fly infested...

However, I'm looking forward to getting it back (even though it's going to have to live somewhere much chillier than my little worms are used to!) as I found it really good for kitchen waste. I couldn't have a compost bin before because I was renting (so most of my garden waste went in a green bin or was used as mulch for my containers) so I liked that my worms could munch through my kitchen scraps. Now I can have proper compost bins, I think there are still some advantages to having a wormery:

1) You can put kitchen scraps in a wormery that might attract rats and mice if put in a compost bin.
2) If anything sprouts in a wormery, the worms will eat the sprouts, so it can be a good option for things like tomatoes or potato peelings where you don't want lots of volunteer plants. (Of course, not everything will sprout and the vermicompost doesn't get hot so won't kill off any seeds that don't sprout before the compost is used.)
3) If you have a suitable space for them, the worms can live indoors which is much more convenient for your scraps on days when it's freezing or rainy outside.
4) The worms are very cute and I love the soft sound of a huge colony of worms moving around in the bin.
5) Worms love to eat paper/cardboard (and I highly recommend giving them plenty as it stops the bin getting wet/keeps them going if you need to go away for a few weeks) so a wormery is a great solution for any confidential paper waste. Good luck to anyone trying to recreate my credit card number from the mush inside Worm #2373's guts.
6) Most of the major problems with wormeries (pest infestations, smell, wet conditions) can be dealt with easily by burying food scraps deep and including plenty of torn up paper/card on top.
7) If you put loads of paper into your compost bin, it can form a bit of a solid modged-together layer once it gets wet. It'll do the same in a wormery, but then the worms just chomp right through it and you're good.
8) A wormery is a good talking point. Non-gardening people are much more interested in hearing about a wormery than they would be hearing about a regular compost bin.
9) They are appealing to children.
10) If you have good conditions, a few starter worms can rapidly increase in number until they can manage a really good volume of food waste.
11) The worms can process foods that you wouldn't want to put on your compost heap, like cooked foods, rice, pasta, bread etc.
12) If you wanted, you could use the worms for purposes in addition to the compost like Vinny's fishing worms or food for chickens.

We have a stacking wormery, which we don't use anymore, and a Hungry Bin. We don't feed them kitchen scraps nowadays as the resulting vermicompost was always too wet and stodgy. Instead they get a moistened mix of coffee grounds, shredded cardboard, ground egg shell and unfinished compost, plus bits of bread, rice or other grains going to waste. You don't need an actual wormery, any plastic container with a lid will do as long as it has some kind of drainage and air flow. I find our dalek bins, used for maturing homemade compost, turn into unintended wormeries anyway.

There is some evidence that vermicompost can reduce damping off and other plant diseases. I use it as part of my seedling and potting mixes, up to 20% by volume. The plants seem to like it.

I made one a few years ago out of a old lidded cistern but It didn’t do very well so I tipped the contents into my Dalek instead.

I use a wormery and have found that, as Proserpina has said you get better results when you add cardboard /paper into the mix, using kitchen waste usually adds a lot of moisture, which is collected as worm juice, but some people think to get the best compost from your worms there should be no or very little juice from the wormery, to get that you need something bigger than the usual size, tiered wormeries that are on sale, the advice is also to avoid onions and citrus fruit skins as the worms don't like material like that, I do think it gives better compost and as t.t.t has said it is also believed that it helps keep plants healthier