Reln Can-O-Worms Review
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Scary but true: the average Brit chucks away a third of the weekly food shop. Worse still, that food waste -- veg peelings, unloved leftovers and brown-looking broccoli -- heads off to landfill and starts producing potent greenhouse gases. In other words, bad news. A good composter or wormery, however, could take that waste, turn it into free compost and help your garden grow. A wormery's main one-up over composters -- aside from the chance to play with worms -- is its speed and the ability to take cooked food. And this wormery's main one-up over rivals is its neat stacking design.
Dustbin-style wormeries are fine if you're a worm pro, but they can be tricky when collecting finished compost, and can hinder air circulating to keep things healthy. The Can-O-Worms, by contrast, comes with three stacking layers which you add as the worms eat more food and, well, poo it out as compost-like material. Once you've filled one layer, stick another on top and let the worms migrate up (they do, honest). Provided the bottom layer has turned to compost -- ours took around six months to get that far -- you can lift it out and use it in your garden.
Getting started is easy. The plastic legs and stacks snap together simply, and the instructions are user-friendly and helpfully assume you know zilch about worms. No-nos such as adding onions and meat to your wormery, for example, are clearly flagged up.
If you opt for the £90 value pack we trialled -- you can buy the wormery alone for £60 -- the Can-O-Worms arrives with roughly 1,000 worms, lime mix (to stop your worm nirvana from getting too acidic), worm treat (to help speed the worms up) and a coir -- that's fibre from a coconut palm -- moisture mat (to keep 'em dry). In our two-person home, the lime mix and treat ran out after three months, though we didn't require extra to keep things running. Our mat got wet and rotted away within a month, though, which something we've heard other owners experiencing. Fortunately, the worms seem to do fine without it.
Which brings us to the trickier part of a wormery: maintenance. You need to regularly (once a week, say) lift the lid and look for worms and leftovers to ensure the worms aren't getting overfed or underfed. Then there's the worm wee, which works its way to the bottom and needs to be regularly drained off at a tap on the side to keep the worms healthy. We found this is a pain. Plastic bottles placed underneath wobbled over in the wind, while larger bowls ended up collecting rainwater too. In the end, we just left the tap draining off the wigglers' wee, which is a shame since you can dilute it one part to ten parts' water and use it as a natural fertiliser.
More encouragingly, when it comes to maintenance, worms are incredibly hardy and breed like rabbits. To our shame, we've occasionally left ours for weeks on end without food and discovered the worms were getting on fine upon our return.
This wormery is made from recycled plastic, which is good. But if you're buying in the UK, the fact it's made in Australia is bad -- that's a long way for a wormery to travel. The plus side of the manufacturing is we can make the assumption that Australian labour law ensured the Bruces and Sheilas who made your Can-O-Worms enjoyed respectable working conditions and pay.
Finally, there's the price tag of this worm house, which will raise some eyebrows. If you have a garden, virtually any successful wormery makes sense in the long-term since you'll likely make your money back on shop-bought peat-free compost (£12 for 25 litres) within five years. Compared to its rivals, however, the Can-O-Worms is not the cheapest stackable wormery available. You can get buy similar for £10 to £20 less, but in our opinion most are heinously ugly -- meaning the Can-O-Worms justifies its mark-up on the grounds that it is the least offensive-looking.
Quality
Value
Ethics
Green
