🌱 The Complete Value Pack – What’s Inside

Choose your setup:

• 250 g Live Composting Worms – fresh from our farm.

• 250 g Worm Voucher – perfect for gifting so the recipient can claim worms when ready.

Every kit includes:

• Urbalive Compact Worm Farm (Grey or Green)

• Two 15 L working trays + 2 L base with drain tap

• Bedding Coir Block (starting medium)

• Moisture Mat (Wiggly Worm Blanket)

• 1 kg Anti-Acid Lime Mix (to balance pH and reduce odours)

• 1 kg Worm Treat (boosts digestion and absorbs moisture)

• The Wiggly Guide to Worm Composting + setup videos and live support

• Full access to our Wiggly Knowledge Base for ongoing advice

Optional extras:

• Add an extra tray for larger households or office use.

• Combine with a Wiggly Bokashi Kit for pre-fermenting cooked food and speeding up composting.

🪱 How the Worm Farm Works

The Urbalive Compact is designed to mimic a healthy forest floor, where leaves and fruit fall from above, microbes and surface-litter worms (epigeic species) feed in the top few inches, and finished, humus-rich material forms below. Your kit recreates those conditions in a tidy, stackable system that keeps everything aerobic, moist, and well-ventilated—exactly what composting biology needs.

The tray system (continuous-flow made simple)

• Two working trays sit above a sealed liquid reservoir. Each tray has a perforated base and subtle ventilation channels that allow air to circulate and excess moisture to drain.

• You start by bedding the bottom tray with rehydrated coir and a small amount of food; add the worms and cover with the moisture mat. The mat keeps the surface dark and damp, which encourages worms to feed right at the top (where decomposition is fastest) and helps deter fruit flies.

• As you add scraps to the top tray, the worms naturally migrate upwards through the holes to find the freshest food—just as they would travel to new leaf fall in woodland litter. Below them, yesterday’s feed is stabilising and maturing into fine, crumbly vermicompost.

• When the top tray is full, simply swap it to the bottom, lift off the now-mature lower tray, and harvest the finished compost. Pop the emptied tray back on top and carry on. There’s no turning, no heavy lifting, and you’re never disturbing the entire system—just cycling trays.

• Any liquid that percolates through the casts collects in the base as leachate; drain it via the tap and dilute 1:10 for ornamental plants. (For vegetables and seedlings, brew aerated worm tea from finished compost for a microbe-rich tonic.)

Why this works for the “right” worms

• The working species—Tiger Worms / Brandlings (Eisenia fetida) and Dendrobaenas (Dendrobaena veneta)—are epigeic, meaning they live and feed in surface litter, not deep soil. That’s why they excel in a wormery where food is presented at the surface and fresh material arrives regularly.

• They are native/naturalised and widely established in the UK, commonly found in manure heaps, leaf litter, compost piles and farmyard bedding. In contrast, garden “lobworms” (Lumbricus terrestris) are anecic (deep-burrowing). Lobworms build long vertical burrows in mineral soil and do not thrive in the warm, oxygen-rich, food-dense conditions of a wormery. Using the correct epigeic mix is the key to speed and stability.

How the design emulates a forest floor

• Fresh feed on top (like new leaf fall), microbes and worms active just beneath, maturing humus below—the trays preserve this natural vertical gradient.

• The moisture mat replicates the insulating leaf layer that keeps a forest floor dark and humid, so worms stay at the surface where their work is fastest.

• The perforations and channels maintain oxygen flow, preventing anaerobic pockets and the odours that come with them.

• Continuous draining to the base keeps the body of the compost moist, not waterlogged, just like well-structured litter over free-draining soil.

Easy harvesting, continuous results

• Because worms chase fresh food upward, the lower tray is left with stable, finished vermicompost that’s easy to lift out and use—no sieving, no forking, no up-ending a heavy bin.

• Want more throughput? Add an extra tray to increase surface area and give the colony room to expand; as populations grow, processing speed increases naturally.

In short: the Urbalive works with worm biology, not against it—feeding at the surface, keeping conditions oxygen-rich and evenly moist, and letting you harvest mature compost without disrupting the colony. It’s the forest floor, neatly stacked and managed on your worktop or in your greenhouse.