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How To Build a Worm Tower

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Updated – February 2024

Worm towers are DIY vermicomposting bins built into your garden and are just one of many techniques that permaculture designers can use to support the health and production of one’s favorite trees or shrubs. They are especially ideal to place within a plant guild as well.

The empty inside of a just-installed worm tower.

How to Use
Above is an empty worm tower pictured as it was installed into the ground in the center of a plant guild at Midwest Permaculture in Stelle, IL.  We then put in some wet straw for bedding, a handful of red wiggler composting worms, and a day’s worth of kitchen scraps. For the next couple of weeks, we added our daily kitchen scraps until it was full.  Thereafter, the contents would slowly sink down as the worms enjoyed their feast, turning scraps into pure worm castings.  About once a week there would be enough room to add another day’s worth of kitchen scraps.  If someone had 7-towers they could top off one per day.

The beauty of the system?  No mess, no fuss, no smell, no slimy buckets, no flies, and no compost juice to drain. Just insert kitchen scraps and walk away. The plants growing around the worm tower love the nutrients. The worms love their new home. We harvest the worm castings once a year in the spring. The only maintenance is to be sure the area stays moist in dry times (can’t let the worms dry out).

This free PDF gives you simple, step-by-step instructions on how to build a worm tower. Vermicomposting is one of the fastest ways to turn food waste into high-quality compost.

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Winter?
We’ve used the worm tower for many years in our Northern Illinois climate and during the winter months, everything slows down including our worms.  But our little friends have made it through each winter by burrowing down below the frost line which is why the tower should be adequately deep and kept full over the winter months. We also keep the area around and on top of the tower covered with leaves or straw overwinter to minimize freezing depth.

Keep it full through the winter for food and insulation.

Harvesting the Castings
Harvesting the castings from our worm tower is simple. Come spring, all the worms migrate upwards to the top third of the tower in search of fresh kitchen scraps, so we set aside the wormy top third to replace after harvesting. Then we use a trowel around the inside edge to loosen up the castings and any small roots that have entered the holes from the surrounding perennial plants. Then remove these pure castings by hand and place them into a bucket for Becky. She now has these amazing castings to integrate into her potting mixes or compost.

Once spring arrives, the top of the tower practically disappears in our garden bed at Midwest Permaculture. What’s not to like?

What we like about the worm tower is how easy it is to make and use.   This is a simple and clean way to dispose of kitchen scraps while feeding our gardens at the same time.

And by the way, is there any reason that drilling a bunch of holes in an old 5-gallon bucket and sinking that into the ground would not work as well?  One would just want to be sure it is mulched heavily over winter to prevent the worms from freezing. And the lid is bigger (a bit more unsightly?) but one could cover that with a potting base and put a nice potted plant on top of that for looks! What other variations might there be on this theme?  And what other materials might we use besides plastics?

What About the Potential Toxicity of PVC and Other Plastics?

Like many others, we had not done research on the environmental stability of PVC before we became excited about the worm towers. We knew that the manufacture of Polyvinyl Chloride was highly toxic but were not aware of any pollution problems once it was in use. Our assumption was that if so many others were already using PVC for many gardening and aquaponic uses then it must be safe!
 
Not necessarily so.  We discovered later on that there is a likelihood of trace toxicity emanating from PVC so we did do some further research.
 
Here are our layperson conclusions:
– Sunlight is the main culprit in PVC degradation. because most of the pipe is in the ground, and we keep a cover over the top, we feel that the amount of sunlight-related toxicity coming from the pipe is minuscule.
– By minuscule, we understand that a person living in a typical suburban/urban environment is receiving substantially more environmental toxicity just from breathing the air than what they will ever pick up from their PVC worm tower.
– As it is today, much of the supply piping that brings water to most houses is PVC anyway.
So for us, we see the use of PVC for our worm towers to be a minimal risk.
 
The bottom line, however… it’s still PVC and we will use as little of it as possible in the future. The pipes we used were left-over inventory from the building of our community in the early 1970’s. The pipes were lying out at the edge of a field. Turning a few of them into worm towers was our attempt to repurpose a ‘waste’ material. Sort of like turning swords into plow shares.
 
That’s our best thinking on all this. We hope this is helpful!
 
-Bill… for Midwest Permaculture

Worm towers are one of many simple tools permaculturists can use to transform the world.

We cover this and countless other brilliant regenerative design ideas in our permaculture courses.
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