A Hearty Welcome to the Worms

It all started about a month ago when I was sitting on the futon reading the quarterly newsletter from our local children’s museum. The article was stressing the importance of involving young children in earth friendly activities, and had a large list of ways families can lessen their detrimental inlfluence the destruction of our natural resources. Among the suggestions, was the mention of vermicomposting: composting with worms. Various different types of bins filled with composting redworms can be set up right inside your house: in the basement, kitchen, garage, or on your patio . . . wherever it might be convenient for you. The rich worm castings that the worms produce from digesting your food is a perfect natural fertilizer for not only your garden, but also houseplants and trees and all sorts of things.

So I started to do a little research on vermicomposting. The idea of composting had been intriguing to me for some time, but I never gave it all that much consideration because we don’t have a vegetable garden, and real yard composting simply produces so much compost . . . what would we do with it? It was easier to just give our yard waste over to the city to compost for various parks. But vermicomposting . . . it sounded like just the thing for me. I’ve always admired worms. I’m all about reducing our garbage production since we pay for garbage removal by the volume we produce.

I read and read about different systems, and finally decided on the Can of Worms wormery because of it’s simple, so maintenance funtionality.

One morning Dr. Peds had a nasty neckache, so I was rubbing his neck and being very sweet and nice.

Me: Honey, how do you feel about getting a recycled plastic wormery and 2,000 worms to eat our kitchen scraps?

Dr. Peds: (Abruptly sitting straight up with extremely alert eyeballs) WHAT? What did you just say?

He couldn’t believe that I could come up with yet another unexpected crazy idea, but after not too much work, I convinced him, and the wormery came via UPS. I set it all up and decided that as soon as we got back from North Dakota I’d get the worms.

It’s great! Just as great as I thought it would be. The kidlets are SOOOOO excited. The wormery consists of different trays for the worms to live and breed in and produce compost (eventually there will be 20,000 worms that produce about one large tray of compost a month). The bottom tray holds the worm tea (liquid worm waste) that is extremely beneficial to plants. Each week I water the worms and let the water dilute the worm tea, which flows out the bottom spiget into an ice cream bucket.

The kidlets love to hold the worms and tell them stories, and Mr. Sneaky Pants is particularly fascinated with feeding them banana peels. He thinks it is the greatest thing ever. In fact, the prospect of feeding worms has been our successful motivating factor for keeping his underwear dry in the church nursery this week. I think in our excitement we may have overfed them this week, so we probably have to wait a few days before adding more kitchen scraps. What can I say, we are a family that produces a lot of banana peels and egg shells. Eventually, when the population builds up I think the worms will be able to handle us, though. The decomposing food doesn’t even smell. In fact, a properly run wormery actually smells like “a pleasant rainforest” as the vermicomposting articles contest. And they’re right.

Right now the worms are living in the garage. In the very coldest months we’ll probably bring them inside . . . maybe in the coat closet? But don’t worry mom, they can’t crawl very far, and you did mention last winter that from now on you are only coming to visit in the summer anyway.

I leave you with a few images of “worm art.” Really what happened is that I plopped a piece of rotting pineapple on top of the white plastic cooler in the garage with several worms attached, but I really like how they turned out.