This is the worm containment solution that I prefer today. It is a combination worm bin and planter and it is easier to use than a regular worm bin. I have gone all out on this unit, buying the full package with the wheels, the lights, and the extra two rings because it is the easiest approach to indoor vegetable gardening I have found. I have some hesitation about promoting this because it is a much more expensive approach than you need to take in order to grow to produce. I eventually decided to include it because it really is a superior design in many ways.
You will want the optional wheel assembly kit for indoor use. These will raise the device enough for a pan to be placed beneath it because it will drip a little, or possibly a lot. The wheels also enable to tower to be moved so that you can clean beneath and around it. The entire assembly will be quite heavy when full of soil and water and you will not be able to readily move it otherwise.
You will also probably want their rather expensive, but quite effective, lighting kit in order to side-light the plants. These are based on LED strips of lights mounted in reflectors. It takes three to light the tower and they come as a set. You could purchase other lighting. I will have more articles about that as time allows.
If your room is reliably at least 65° F., you can follow the methods I use for watering and could also purchase an additional two vertical levels. This is because you will be able to use the ice-based method of watering, described later, which will enable you to keep all seven levels well enough water for your plants. If your room is cooler than that, using ice will create conditions too cold for your plants to grow well and so I do not recommend it. Using the ice method will affect what plants you can grow on the top and in the first row of pockets. Cutting celery and snow peas are examples of cold-tolerant vegetables that do well under these conditions. Be aware that the ice method will constantly occupy 1 square foot of freezer space to a depth of 8 inches. So, determine if this will be a deal killer before you go forward.
I tell you all this here because it affects the list of items that you will need to purchase to set up and use the garden tower. Please read this entire article, and the others in the Garden In You Spare Room series before spending a lot of money.
Your Shopping List
As I said, this is a pretty expensive approach to home gardening. Furthermore, my instructions include a watering method that enables the use of an additional two-level. I want you to see what you are getting into in advance.
From the Garden Tower Project Site
From a local hardware store
- 6 cubic feet of potting soil
- up to 9 Vigoro 24″ plant stands
- A step ladder
- A bus tub
- 2 buckets
- a spray bottle for misting paper and leaves
- A drop light
- A hook to hang the light from the ceiling with
Soil is heavy and expensive to ship. It is generally cheaper to buy it from someone who receives it by the pallet than to have it shipped to your home. This must be soil meant for pots and not soil meant for beds. Also, it needs to be mostly fine-grained material for proper movement and retention of the water. Be careful. Many organic potting soils contain large chunks of wood. These are not desirable for use in the garden tower. If you don’t need it to be organic, the regular Miracle Grow brand potting soil works well. My worms had no issues with it, in case you are worried about that. However, the organic product from the same brand has large pieces of decomposing wood in it and is unsuitable. I myself would have used organic potting soil if that were not the case. My tower is currently full of Garden Time potting soil. It is working well so far. I might use coconut coir the next time.
The Vigaro 24″ plant stands are only needed if you intend to plant climbing plants. These pretty much have to be planted on the first tier beneath the top in order to not shade the other plants.
The step ladder is required because the garden tower is tall. Fully assembled with the extra kit it will be 57” tall. You will have to access the cap on the top every nine days, to put things in, and every month or two you will have to push down from the top when harvesting the compost.
The bus tub will be used to sort the compost. It doesn’t have to be a bus tub, but the shape of those is well suited to the task and will save you time over using a deep bucket.
The buckets have multiple functions.
The drop light and hook are for lighting the top of the Garden Tower
Other Items
- 18 30-ounce stainless steel malt cups
- An instant-read thermometer
- A wall-mounted combination thermometer and hygrometer
- Red Wigglers (order after setup)
The malt cups will be used to contain the ice that you will use to water your tower.
You almost certainly know what thermometers do.
A hygrometer is a device that measures the humidity in the air. Neither of these is essential, but they are nice to have and are not expensive.
Composting worms (red wigglers). These must be Red Wigglers and not some other type of worm. This kind is never sold as fish bait because fish don’t like them. Red worms sold as bait are not the same species. Red wigglers live at high densities and eat compost. You can get the smallest package available. The worms will rapidly multiply to the right numbers for your tower.
You do not have to have them for the initial setup. If you waited until you have the tower set up to order your worms, then there would be more ready food for them in the environment when they arrive. You should read my separate article about Red Wigglers here. In my experience, they have not arrived pest free and so I advise cleaning the worms from the shipping media before adding them. This is detailed in that article.
From the grocery store
- Aluminum Turkey Pan
This will be the drip tray that goes under the garden tower to keep your floor dry.
From the trash
3 gallons shredded brown paper, loosely packed
I rip paper bags up, but I have someone local who rarely remembers her reusable bags, though plastic grocery bags are illegal in my city, so she always has free paper bags for me when I need them. Hopefully, you can find a source, or you could use brown packing paper.
From outdoors (optional)
3 gallons of dried leaves, loosely packed or more brown paper
It would ideal if these came from some branch that was cut when the leaves were green because these will contain more nutrients than those the tree has dropped. However, this is not very important. If you don’t find those any dried leaves from some deciduous tree will do.
The shredded paper and leaves will be combined and become the original contents of the composting cylinder. The paper will help keep the leaves from sticking together when damp. If that were to happen on a large scale, your tower would start hot composting and this is not desirable for your worms. We want this material in advance because the tower is easier to assemble if you fill the composting tube with something as you go. It will help hold it in place and keep the potting soil from getting into it too much while you are filling the planting cylinder.
These could be a possible vector for insects to get into your garden room, so you may choose to simply use more brown paper. The only negative effect of this is that it will take longer to get compost from the worm bin.
It would ideal if these came from some branch that was cut when the leaves were green because these will contain more nutrients than those the tree has dropped. However, this is not very important. If you don’t find those any dried leaves from some deciduous tree will do.
The shredded paper and leaves will be combined and become the original contents of the composting cylinder. The paper will help keep the leaves from sticking together when damp. If that were to happen on a large scale, your tower would start hot composting and this is not desirable for your worms. We want this material in advance because the tower is easier to assemble if you fill the composting tube with something as you go. It will help hold it in place and keep the potting soil from getting into it too much while you are filling the planting cylinder.
Plants or seeds
You will also want seeds or young plants to transplant. The tower itself affects your choice of crops. In general, you will want to grow smaller plants because otherwise, they will shade those around them. Large plants also require that you back the lights away from the tower, which will slow the growth of the younger plants.
For example, I avoid most cabbage family plants (brassica oleracea) because they are too large. There are exceptions. Kohlrabi are a good size for the tower, as are some compact varieties. I grow a compact variety of cabbage called Caraflex that does well for me on the lowest row of pockets on the tower. It’s particular growth habit works well on that level.
If you are using ice to water it, the top and the first ring will be pretty cool and not all plants will do well there. My personal favorite for the top is cutting celery, also known as leaf celery. This is only a good choice if you cook with celery. This variety is not as good for raw use as the stalk celery they sell at the grocery stores, but it is better for cooking. It’s a cut-and-come-again variety so you only take as many ribs as you need then and it the plant will continue to produce more. I have seven of these and to my surprise, they are more than I use, and I plan to remove one.
Snow peas have done exceptionally well for me in the uppermost ring of pockets. Not the top, but the one just beneath that. You can purchase small metal wire posts that can be buried in the top when you add soil so that these climbing vines will have something to grab. The ones I used are Vigaro 24” plant stands.
Snow peas and cutting celery are far from the only cold-tolerant vegetables. Avoiding plants that are usually too large for the tower, you could grow carrots, radishes, or parsnips, for example. Arugula is another good choice. Even though it is cold-tolerant I have not had good luck with spinach in the garden tower at all and can not recommend it. I might try other varieties in the future, but the variety I tried “Kookaburra” did not perform well for me. I know from my outdoor gardening days that spinach prefers sand, and I suspect that the potting soil that is the problem.
The top, upper ring, and lowest two rings tend to be a little wetter than the middle rings. If not for the slow release from the melting ice, the middle rings will tend to be drier. So much so that unless you are using the ice or a pump-based method to keep it watered, you should not add the kit with the two additional rings, because it will be difficult to keep the entire tower watered.
Mustard greens do exceptionally well at the dryer levels. I plant a variety of salad greens there, lettuces, arugula, etc. Because of my watering method, my entire tower stays pretty wet. When I watered by hand on a five-level tower, I had to be much more careful about what was planted near the middle.
While many of you will transplant into the tower, I always grow from seed. Plants usually start kind of slowly and then accelerate in their growth and you definitely could get a lot more food through there by starting your plants in a separate seed starter and then transplanting them. While this does work, the fact that the garden is lit from the sides instead of the top affects the growth habits of the plants. Grown from seed the plant will shape itself to be well-lit that way. Also, the plant will never have transplant shock. Neither of these is a really big deal, however, and most salad greens are ready within 60 days of planting the seeds, and many are ready within 50 days, so you will be moving things through there at a reasonable pace.
It is not possible to be exhaustive here in dealing with the vegetables you might possibly grow, but I hope that I have given you enough guidance to get you going.
As you can see adding the costs of all these up, setting up a Garden Tower Project 2 planter indoors is a pretty expensive proposition. Outdoors you wouldn’t need the wheels or the lights, and the ice technique would be less predictable. I’m writing about gardening in a spare room, and so I have covered everything needed for indoor use.
Initial Setup
When you have everything you need, except possibly the worms and the plants, it is time to set up your tower.
The salad tower is a planter that is around a worm bin. The inner ring has numerous holes that allow worms and roots to pass between the planter portion and the composting portion within it. These are arranged as concentric cylinders. The outer planting cylinder has pockets for your plants around it much like a strawberry pot.
I have set these up several times and done it several different ways. Basically, you will follow the manufacturer’s instructions. These do not substitute for those, but I will add some additional commentary to them based on my experiences. It will go easier for you if you read these before you do the assembly.
Once you have attached the feet and the wheels to the base and placed that where you would like the salad tower to be, you should place the disposable turkey roasting pan beneath the unit, between the wheels. This will not really matter yet, but you will be adding some water soon so you might as well put it there now.
Just above the drawer on one side of the base, there is an insert with a handle. This is called the gate. The gate is only used when you harvest the compost. Be sure you have inserted this the right way consistent with the manufacturer’s instructions. Be aware that when you remove this after the unit has been in use, it is going to be a little messy. You will want a bucket or something to put it in. Also, if you have small children, it might be a good idea to put a bungee cord hooked through the handle, stretched around the back of the base, and hooked again to the handle, so your youngster can’t put it out and make a big mess.
With the feet, wheels, and base fully assembled it is time to put together the upper part.
Examine the parts of the inner composting cylinder. You will notice that one of them does not have holes on its side. This is meant to be the top one, so set it aside. Examining one of the others you will see that it has a notch on the bottom. The bottom is the end with the lip. Examining the base you will see the tab that goes into this notch. Line this up with the tab in the base and insert it fully.
As you will see at the manufacturer’s site it is best to secure the central column with long tie wraps. We do this because it’s pretty easy to knock over the composting ring during assembly if it is left unsupported.
Now add the first outer ring.
Please go and fill this most of the way with soil, up to about two inches from the top. You do not want to cover the holes around the edge that you will insert the next section into. You also want to avoid filling these holes with dirt. You could wrap the end of nine pencils in tape to make them fat enough to fill the holes and insert them in each to make it easier if you want to pour in the soil, but I use a scoop, for greater control. Be careful to pull the soil all the way out to the edge of the pocket that was created when you installed the ring. You do not want a deep drop from the lip to the soil. The soil will continue to compress a bit after you are done.
It takes a little longer but it’s worth it to take the time during setup. While you might replace all your soil someday, it probably will not be soon. The work you are doing now will likely be untouched for years. Unless you get some infestation or something, you will probably just add a little soil at a time after you removed some plant.
Next, you should water the soil in that lowest ring to the point where it is wet but not so saturated that water runs out of it when you lightly squeeze it in your hand. I don’t know which potting soil you have or how much moisture is already in it. Going slowly like this allows you to adjust as well as support the compost cylinder. Make sure the wet soil is still up to the level you were at before, especially out in the pockets, and that there are no unfilled areas.
Now, add the second composter section. It works just like the first one except it attaches to the next lower segment rather than the base. Repeat the entire process that you on the bottom level, including the filling of the compost cylinder with the damped paper and leaf combination, and the soil and water, always being mindful of filling the pockets and leaving no gaps. You will continue in this way until you reach the topmost level.
If you purchased the Vigoro 24” plant stands for growing snow peas or other climbers, place their bases in the bottom of the pocket area in the top with the vertical part against the outer wall of the pocket before you fill that level with the soil. Your peas will be planted in the first row beneath the top. The cup with ice will be against it just inside of the post, and there will be room in the center for the crop you will be top lighting.
I didn’t write much about their lighting because the documentation that comes with it is enough. It’s not very complicated, you mostly want it as close to your plants as it can be without burning them, according to them that distance is ten inches. You have to point them correctly but this is quite obvious. I run my lighting 16 hours per day. The timer is also easily understood and well documented so I don’t discuss it here.
Stuff that worms eat is already growing on those damp leaves and paper you inserted and it will soon be growing in the soil as well. There is not much of it yet, but it’s working on it. This is a good time to order the worms if you are getting them online. There will be more for them to eat by the time they arrive. If you already have worms, you could clean them and add them now. Just put them on the soil and they will crawl into it and sort things out themselves. These little guys don’t require much, and your salad tower, especially once some plants have been grown in it, is a very nice artificial habitat for them. Indoors without temperature extremes, your little buddies are going to be feeling pretty good in there even with the ice water.
By all reports, Red Wigglers really like it best between 60 and 80 degrees. You can’t do this yet, but when you get ice on there later, you can use the instant-read thermometer to take the soil temperature at various locations. When I push it in at an angle to get it just beneath some of the melting ice I get a reading of 55° F, which is warm enough, and that is the coldest spot except immediately where ice touches the soil. The first row of pockets beneath the top shows 66° in my case currently. The ambient air temperature when I took these readings was 72° F as were the lowest levels. Don’t think you are sending your worms to Siberia. They’ll be fine.
At this point, you may transplant starts or plant seeds, the tower is ready to start growing. The rest is about keeping it watered and fertilized.
Preparing the Ice
Once you are watering it, excess water will accumulate in the drawer, and a small amount will drip into the turkey pan. As of now, though, your soil is just wet enough and hopefully, not a lot is running into the drawer. Assuming the turkey pan is there go ahead and have a look.
It is important to use the turkey pan when using this approach. You will want to hand-water the pockets until they germinate and you might overflow the drawer if you are watering a lot of plants or your evaporation rate is low.
If there is more than a tiny amount of water, go ahead and pour it into the bucket.
We need 9 of the 18 malt cups now and something that allows you to measure water. I use a pint and a half-sized Ball mason jar that has measurements on it in ounces and milliliters.
If you had water in the drawer, go ahead and pour it from the bucket into the jar. I suggest you start with 2 cups of water in each cup. This is not a big deal, but you should probably wait a bit and empty the drawer again if needed, just to be sure it doesn’t overflow. You won’t be putting the ice on for hours anyway because it has to freeze. Overnight would be an easy time frame. Once going you will be doing this at twelve-hour intervals.
Once you have 2 cups of water in each of the 9 malt cups, you simply put them in the freezer. Allow them to freeze overnight. In the future, they will get changed every 12 hours. When it is 65 or above we have the windows open and the temperature varies quite a bit. We’re pretty tolerant and I use that temperature more for the worms and the plants than for us.
The next day, rotate the tower one position over. You will want to do this each day for more uniform lighting on the plants. Now, place the nine frozen malt cups of water top down on the soil at each of the wide spots on the top. Check the drawer and pour any water into the bucket. You will not be able to evaluate if you are using the right amount of water until tomorrow, so go ahead and fill the other 9 malt cups with 2 cups of water, starting with any from the drawer, and freeze them as before.
If you find that there is a lot of ice left, this indicates that there is probably not much air movement around the malt cups. In my first garden room, there was a ceiling fan directly above the tower. The ice always completely melted in the 12-hour period. In the new room, there is no fan and the ice melted too slowly. For that reason, I now remove the steel malt cups, leaving the uncovered ice, one hour after putting them on the top. Otherwise, my plants would not get watered sufficiently. The point is constant, slow, watering
It is dry here and there is a good chance that I lose more water from the tower to the air than people in more humid places. You may have to use less water than I do. You will have to judge by the amount in the drawer. Ideally, it will be half full.
The third day is really your first opportunity to judge whether or not the volume of water was insufficient or excessive. Temperature affects the melt rate and your soil affects how much is retained, so I can’t entirely predict this for you. Because water expands when it freezes, you can’t use a lot more than 800 ml in these cups. You would only want that much under higher temperature conditions in dry air as we experience here in the summer. Again, we live in a high-altitude dry area, and leave our windows open in the summer, resulting in more water lost to evaporation than many will ever have.
Now it is time to refill the first set of malt cups using what you have learned. Rinse the rims of the first set of 9 malt cups, and empty the drawer at the base of the garden tower into a bucket. Toss any small pieces of ice into the bucket to melt in the water. It is possible that there are large pieces of ice, which would indicate that you might want to remove the steel cups an hour after putting the ice on the tower to increase the melt rate. Alternatively, you could use a fan to increase air circulation.
If you have not already added your worms, once they arrive they should be checked for pests and cleaned. Please see the Red Wigglers Arrive with Pests section of the Red Wigglers article for more information about that process. Also, don’t be fooled like I was and mistake soil mites for aphids that will eat your plants. I have reason to believe that I am not the only person to have made this mistake.
Then simply put them onto the pockets and not right by the ice on the top. They will bury themselves immediately in most cases unless they are recovering from being dried and shipped in which case they might be a little lethargic.
Though I have seen recommendations that you should wait a week or two before adding the worms, I have not had issues with their survival. Red wigglers are not very picky and the microorganisms that they eat reproduce very quickly in damp conditions. On the other hand, it won’t hurt anything if you do wait a week or two.
You may or may not see the worms for a while after this. I wouldn’t worry. If you go on to use the tower more or less as instructed, the worms will be fine.
I should probably say that this is not remotely the watering approach the manufacturer describes. I arrived at this on my own through experimentation mostly because I wanted to use all seven rings to get as many plants as possible into that space. In my experience, the middle rows, even with five levels instead of seven, tend to get dry enough to slow plant growth.
It took me some time to arrive at the use of the steel malt cups. You can learn from my mistakes.
At first, I used pint and half freezer-safe jars. These are those that have no ‘shoulders’, that is the sides go straight, vertically, up to the top. You will see these marked as freezer safe on their packaging.
As I soon discovered, freezing clear water in ‘freezer safe’ jars tends to break them. So, I started adding coffee grounds to the bucket then the drawer water, then tap water up to the level I needed. I stirred it and then added it to the jars. While this mostly worked, and I did it for quite some time, it left a deepening layer of coffee residue that I removed some of periodically, and they still broke far too often.
So, I moved to plastic food storage containers. These work well enough. They often have measurements on the side which are very handy for this use. You will place about 2 cups of liquid in each one. Water expands when it freezes so the container should have enough headspace to allow for that. These are affordable, but wear out rather quickly. Unlike with the jars, the ice is easily removable from these containers, by running a little warm water over the back, so you only need one set of nine. There is no need to mix the water with coffee grounds because the plastic does not break when the water freezes.
However, the rectangular form factor leaves less room for plants near the center on top, as well as taking up more horizontal space in the freezer than the glass jars or steel cups which hold the water more vertically. Other than their breaking, the glass performed better than the plastic for keeping all the levels of the tower wet enough for the plants.
Eventually I looked for steel containers which led me to the 30 ounce steel malt cups which have been ideal.
You can fertilize other plants with some of the water from the garden tower. Unlike the leachate from a standard worm bin, the stuff in the drawer is not concentrated and can be used as is.
Feeding the worms
Previously when my tower was established, I add almost exclusively browns, and I had a large number of worms. The salad tower makes its own greens for the worms, in the form of the roots of the previously harvested plants. These will push into the composting portion. Also, unless you dry your trimmings and add them as browns, you would not be able to use many because greens are only added a couple of tablespoons at a time, to avoid hot composting.
I have recently changed the soil in the tower and now I am feeding the worms every nine days. Once my plants are being harvested and I have more vegetable waste to dry I will go back to only using browns. As I mentioned before, I turn the tower one on nine positions each day, and I have pea posts in the 8 of the top pockets. When it comes around to the one with no post in front, it is easiest to access the cap on the worm bin. Indeed, this is why there are not 9 pea posts. My reason for choosing nine days is no more complicated than that.
I am also amending with Dr. Earth Organic Gold fertilizer when I add new soil. This happens frequently when plants are harvested. There is typically a hole where the plant was. I am experimenting with a teaspoon for every two cups of soil. This particular fertilizer is recommended and sold by the manufacturer of the garden tower.
The easiest mistake to make is over-feeding the worms unless you are only using browns like I usually am, in which case that is not an issue. There is a lot of root material in one of these and the dried vegetable waste will go along with the dead root material as food for your worm’s food. Just feed them a few tablespoons every week or nine days, and check that they have eaten it before giving them more.
In terms of what you give them fresh, it is much easier to tell you what you can’t put in there, than what you can. Red Wigglers are not very picky.
You should avoid all aliums, that is the family of plants containing onions and garlic, you should avoid all manner of citrus fruits and all nightshades, such as tomatoes or potatoes, including their foliage. Potato peels however are an exception and may be chopped fine and added or dried and used as browns, if they were organically grown. Pesticides will kill your worms.
Nothing dense like beans, rice, or peanuts should be added to the composter. They will rot unpleasantly.
Pretty much any other food plant is fine, cut fine in small amounts. They are very fond of avocado, and if one is going on you, you can just place it on top of the composter without the peel or seed. I rarely have any extra avocados.
Do not add more food until it is gone. The worms can crawl right through that soft material and it is one of the few greens you don’t have to cut fine when not dried. However, I rarely have waste avocado.
More typically, I will microwave a banana peel for one minute, chop it finely and then feed that to the worms. It is necessary to microwave it or you will introduce fruit flies and they will fly all over your garden room.
Whenever you do feed your worms any sort of greens, that is fresh, not dried food, you would wait until they eat it to give them more. You should put any browns you have accumulated atop the last feeding, mist them with water, and place the new food on top of that.
At some point, the tube will become more full, despite all the decomposition that is happening. At that time, or after about two months you will be ready to go through the process of harvesting castings. You may not get many at first, especially if you used only paper and no leaves. This is not really a problem, except that you don’t have them for fertilizer for your other plants.
Harvesting Castings
The salad tower is what is known as a pass-through composter. You put new material in the top, and it slowly settles down in the tube as the material beneath it is consumed. I dry most of my wastage, that is the parts of the vegetables that are not used, and other organic (or at least pesticide-free) produce because this is the only way to compost even all the excess that the tower produces. The composter will consume a lot of browns, but only a small amount of greens.
This is because the greens will hot compost, and that is detrimental to your worms and your general environment in your tower. You have initially filled the composting tube with damp paper and leaves. These will collapse very quickly and you will add more of the browns to the top. You don’t have to worry about using too much, as you would with greens, except that you don’t want to pack them in there, and it only holds so much.
As tall as mine is, and this is a reason to consider not using the extra two rings, I have to stand on a step ladder to look down into it.
Just above the drawer, there is the handle that should only be pulled at times like this. Be advised that this handle is connected to the partition that is between the compost and the drawer. It will be both messy and wet when it comes out of there. Have something ready to put it in.
Once a month or so, when the drawer has been emptied of water, you should open the gate and, using your hand or some tool, lightly push down on the material in the composting tube. Sometimes you might have to pull material from the bottom. Other times it might just fall in with a gentle push on top.
You will notice that I keep telling you not to compress the contents, hopefully, it will generally fall through the bottom for the drawer and you can push the gate back into it.
The manufacturer’s videos use straw plugs in places during the filling process. Their stated reason for doing so is because critters could be attracted to your bin and try to get inside it, to get what is in the compost, if it is outdoors.
This is not an exaggeration. When I was using one of these outside I frequently found the lid had been removed by some creature and have seen squirrels doing it. I eventually used a bungee cord to hold it on.
Indoors under lights, wildlife raiding your compost should not be an issue. It is for this reason that I do not give a detailed example of their plug method. Its primary advantage is not applicable to indoor gardening. If you happen to have a pet squirrel, monkey, raccoon, or some other pet with clever enough hands to get into the bin, or you decide to move it outside, you should watch the videos at https://gardentowerproject.com/learning-center/ and see how to use straw to make a plug.
In my method I avoid all compaction to the degree I can, both to avoid hot composting and so that it does not make a clump that does not move easily through the tube. If that were to happen you would need to use a stick or something to push it through, but being gentle usually works.
You only want to remove about the drawer’s depth of material each month. Then you must reinsert the gate. This is sometimes a little difficult. You possibly have to wiggle and press hard to get it fully in again.
Then you will need to remove any worms and put them back in the tower, you can just drop them on the soil anywhere away from the ice and they will dig into it. It helps to have three buckets.
When you have a drawer full of compost, empty it into a bus tub, optimally, or bucket, replace the gate, rinse the drawer and then reinsert it.
There are three things in that bus tub. Worm castings, undigested material, and worms. This bit is obviously messy but the principles are very simple. You want to remove the worms and the undigested material from the castings in the bus tub. The worms and undigested material can both go in the same bucket. You leave the castings in the bus tub or whatever you used.
The worms and the undigested material go back into the top of the composter. Simply remove the cap and put them in there. There should be some space from your gently pushing down before.
The worms have a tendency to mostly migrate upwards. Because of this, it might be a few months before you get a drawer of worm castings. If the stuff comes out looking mostly like it came in simply put it back into the top. What you are wanting will be mostly shiny and black.
When you get castings, these can be used for top dressing the tower and other plants. You simply put a half-inch layer of the castings on the soil around the plants but not too near them. I’m more nervous than many, I’ve burned plants with worm castings, though not from the tower, and so I tend to only top dress around the outside edges of pots.
It can also be frozen, and you could add a teaspoon or two, frozen or unfrozen, to each cup of water you are about to freeze. There are never plants directly beneath these cups and so will not be burned, and freezing and melting will help break down the castings.
The worms you simply return to the soil, and the undigested material goes back into the top of the composter. It’s not complicated nor is it very time-consuming. You might be wondering why you only got such a short explanation. That’s why. I realized while writing all this that I do not have any pictures of this process already. It’s not incredibly photogenic, unlike the pretty vegetables that I have loads of pictures of. I’ll do that next time I do it and will get Tracey to take some photos of the process. My hands will be too messy to hold the phone.
Between what I have told you and the manufacturer’s instructions I think you should be really well prepared to go forward with indoor gardening under lights with a Garden Tower Project 2 salad tower.