Thursday, July 2, 2009

More Worms!




















(pictures -- from top: Dexter drilling holes, the worm bedding, the worms, feeding the worms, and a lovely worm salad.)
We finally set up our worm bin today. We quit composting about a month before we moved. We didn't think the new owner of our house would be excited about our worm bins. So we reluctantly returned to throwing our food scraps in the garbage and spread the lovely wormy compost in the garden. We thought it would be a brief break from compost.

Unfortunately our rental house isn't all that compost-friendly. The yard is tiny and completely exposed to the neighbors. The development has lots of rules, some pretty dumb. I'm pretty sure acompost pile in the backyard would not be viewed as appropriate landscaping. I could collect our kitchen scraps and haul them out to our property but I'm a little too lazy for that. And even I am not that excited about decomposing corn cobs in the back of my car.

So we set up a worm bin. Two tupperware tubs with holes punched in them, stacked one in the other. The bottom one will catch the liquid released from the compost. The top one serves as home for our pound of red wigglers. It has drainage and air holes, shredded paper and cardboard, and our fruit and vegetable scraps.

For those of you following the blog -- yes, I did buy worms again. Twice in a week! Once from a vending machine and this time from a guy with a "worm farm". In California our worms were free. But the red wigglers are supposed to be better composters, eating up to their weight in food scraps each day. So I bought a pound.

Kirk says they better be hungry. He was a big fan of our cheap and easy approach to compost in California. We cut holes in two old garbage cans and put just about everything in those cans -- shredded paper from the office, all our coffee grinds and kitchen scraps, old newspapers. We then mostly ignored the whole mess, except once every couple of weeks Kirk and Bella would go out to check on the worms and turn the compost. The system worked fine and we had hundreds of happy, hungry worms.

At least if these worms don't eat much we can always use them as fishing bait. I'll keep you posted.

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