Make a worm farm lid

The downside to using the stackable black meat trays from “Impact “is that nobody seems to stock a factory made “fitted lid” for the top worm tray. As a result you need to improvise as some sort of lid is required to maintain moisture levels, keep the worms in the dark, to stop various other irritating insects from entering the farm and to “keep it neat.”

You can use anything, preferably plastic, but wood will also do. Just remember that it should not allow too much light in and should be durable enough to withstand the elements. We have used old signs (plastic) pieces of hardboard and even old ceramic tiles.  The downside of the tiles is that they are heavy and particularly for the “helpers” rather heavy to lift on and off when feeding the worms. The longer term aim of the worm farm is to try to seamlessly incorporate it into the entire Cradle Ark prototype. This requires removing as much of the manual intervention (and possible human error?) from the process as possible.

  • We thus decided to try find a suitable lid at the local plastic shop and found one that was clear but just about the right size.
  • We needed to paint the lid black to stop the light. However, we decided to leave a small “viewing window” really for night time interest more than anything else.
  • We thus masked off a block in the middle of the lid.
  • We then sprayed the lid with an etching plastic primer.
  • Once this had dried, (properly) we then spray painted the lid a matt black.
  • Removing the masking tape left us with a very attractive lid with a viewing “window”

The lids were then put in place and held onto the underlying structure with a simple “paper clamp” on each side. This is a test solution but seems an easy and simple method but time will tell if it is robust enough