Worm Wranglin'

Let me start by saying my boyfriend is amazing! When he says he wants to build a chair or make compost bins, you better believe that when you get home from work, you have new furniture and new compost bins. Needless to say, we now have compost bins - and WORMS!! Don't cringe, these aren't an invasive species issue or an outbreak of the creepy crawlers, but rather an aide in creating nutrient rich soil. These worms will eat your vege scraps and then - this might be gross! - poop it all out for some extremely healthy soil. I know it sounds dirty, unsanitary, crazy even, but I remember learning about the necessity of worms in dirt when I was in elementary school. As usual, none of this is new!
The other week we were excited to get worms for our compost bins. Amazingly, we were able to find worms LOCALLY! Narda, who sold us the worms, is the all-knowing vermiculturist when it comes to the red wrigglers; a sort of 'worm guru', if you will. She's also from my area and buying from her not only helped our local economy, but also saved us about $30. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

We decided that Thursdays are to be designated feeding days. Narda informed us that the more we bug the bugs, the less handiwork they'll do. Red wrigglers, as they're known throughout the composting world, don't like a lot of light. In fact, when you open the lids to wherever it is you have them working, you won't see them. They are amazingly fast for worms.

Anyways, Thursday = feed day, and it really couldn't have come sooner. We'd been saving all our veggie scraps and the tubs we use were filling our fridge up fast. And it was starting to smell a little funky to me. Finally though, I arrived home from my long day at work, and we went to the bins. Let me back up by saying that we had been adding vegetable and fruit scraps to the bins in the week while we were waiting for the worms, so they had been working hard for a week already and we were about to see what they had done. At first, it wasn't really visible that anything had been eaten, and there seemed to be a lot of other bug - life going on in the bins, so I was a little worried. But then, we dug down a little bit and lo and behold!

There was what looked like rich, black compost! It was so exciting! Everything has been a worm success so far. In fact, we are probably going to get more worms for the other bin we have. We're planning on using all the compost for our own garden, and whatever we have leftover, we look forward to sharing with friends and family.