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The #1 reason your worm farm fails

Why is my worm farm dying? We've all been there. You have a worm farm, and feel super great that you're doing your part to save the planet. But pretty soon you end up with a dead worm farm, and big smelly disgusting mess to clean up. The main reason your farm may be struggling is over feeding. If you are feeding your worms fresh waste from your kitchen (which is what most home worm farm operators do), it is important to realise that worms don't actually eat your waste. The waste needs to break d...

Carbon Sequestration

It is well known that soil organic matter (SOM) include improves soil quality through: increased retention of water and nutrientsimproved soil structure which helps reduce erosion These improvements to soil conditions result in improved groundwater and surface waster quality, and improved biodiversity in soils. Ultimately these sum up to increased food security and decreased negative impacts to ecosystems. That's a fancy way of saying that returning carbon to the soil is a good thing. Norma...

Do You Sell Vermicast or Worm Tea?

Do you sell your vermicast/worm tea?Soon! We are as excited about providing high quality worm castings to the Waikato public as you are; diverting waste from landfill and returning those nutrients to the soil is why Little Buddies was formed in the first place!In order to provide worm tea and vermicast to the public in Cambridge, Hamilton and surrounding areas in the Waikato, we have a few more processes to complete before we are ready to go. These processes will ensure that you are receiving hi...

Your Compost Could Be Killing Your Garden

If your plants are starting to show twisted, stunted growth and you're not sure why, you may be killing them with kindness. For many years, the idea of adding manure or compost to your garden has been widely considered a good thing to do. It adds organic matter to the soil, and adds valuable biology and nutrients to your garden. Sounds great right? What you may not be aware of, however, is that manure can be laced with compounds and chemicals which will kill your garden. These chemicals come fro...

Windrows vs Continuous Flow Reactors

There are many ways that vermiculture can be managed. The simplest of these methods is known as windrowing. Organic matter is laid in rows, typically around 1.5 meters wide, and about half a meter high, allowing them to be covered by a 2m wide cover if required. Windrows require no extra machinery to operate, however they do take up a fair amount of space - great if you have the land, but problematic if you do not. Windrows are that placed out doors can suffer from temperature and rainfall fluct...

On Site Waste Processing

Large producers of waste often prefer to truck their waste off site to be processed at central facilities. While this may seem attractive, as it gets the waste off your land and out of sight, we prefer to work with you to process waste on site. There are many reasons for this, the primary reason being that we want to keep nutrients local. If you are a stud, dairy farm, orchard or commercial garden, we want to keep your nutrients and return them to your soil. We add to this mix our own comme...

Why Worm Farming?

We believe that a combination of Hot Composting (also known as thermophilic composting) and worm farming is the most efficient means of breaking down organic waste and returning it to the soil. Hot composting provides a rapid means of breaking down organic matter. With the right balances of input materials, decomposition occurs relatively quickly, and generates significant amounts of heat. This heat can kill off seeds and many pathogens that can exist in waste material. The down side to hot comp...

Commercially Compostable Materials

Do you process commercially compostable materials? Yes and No. Commercially Compostable Materials (CCMs) are a bit of a grey area; there is no standard to which CCMs are held, so there isn't a clear definition as to what they are, how they are made, and most importantly how they are degraded under commercial composting conditions, what impacts there are when this occurs, and under what timeframe this decomposition should occur (technically, concrete is compostable given the right conditions and ...