The Worms Are Bedded Down

The second batch of worms from the Kingston Worm Farm have arrived. While the first batch is braving the wilds of the main garden, this crew will be domesticated and live in our basement. I've built some very nice worm condos for our herd. The following outlines our worm strategy.

The basement has two parts:

A conditioned space. Radiant floor heating. Daylight through large windows. Shucks, one room (my office) has is on the southeast corner of the basement and is basically above-ground.

Unconditioned space. It is unheated -- it is on the west end of the basement and, due to the slop

e of the lot, is almost entirely below ground. This is heavily insulated from the main floor above and from the conditioned part of the basement. This unconditioned space is divided into two rooms:

1. The first room is storage, and has things like the houses network gear. Eventually we hope to put a deep freeze there as well to store extra vegetables from our garden.
2. The second room is accessed by moving through the first. The second room is the most "basement-like" room in the basement. Eventually, we hope it will contain a root cellar, a wine cellar, and worm bins.

We have a small wine rack in there. It has a few bottles of wine. Someday I hope there will be a much bigger wine rack that holds many more bottles. Someday I hope that we'll be able to cellar wine for several years in near ideal conditions.

It will be easy to add or build some shelves in this room for "root cellar" o

r pantry (or whatever you'd like to call it) functions. Again, the cool, dry, dark space should be good for storing fresh food.

And of course there are the worms. Finally, we've got the worm bins set up and the worms are bedded down. Here's a photo of the first tier of the worm bin. You can see the faucet that I put at the bottom of the bin to drain off the "worm juice". I've got a heavy cardboard (I've seldom seen cardboard this heavy) shield around the bin to keep down the light and just to keep a cozy spot for the little guys.

Now, this is the inside of the bin. I've got sawdust, shredded newspapers (several references said to use only the black-and-white pages). There is also some shredded cardboard. All of it is moistened so that it's about the dampness of a well-wrung sponge. Oh, and the really dark stuff? Well that's the "worm castings" that the worms arrived in.

So far I've only put in a little bit of food for the worm guys. All the references say that once they're well established, these guys can really chow down on the kitchen scraps. They like stale bread, rice, veggies. Pretty much anything that's not meaty-greasy-spicy. I sort of think of them as vegan worms. There are lots of worms in there......

A couple of pounds of worms can easily manage the table and food prep scraps for a family of four, so I'm sure our little colony can do well on what Angel & I produce.

A few of them crawl up the sides. I generally knock them back down when I open the lid. Once they've converted all the bedding to more "worm castings", I'll add another layer to the worm farm. It's already built and has lots of holes on the bottom for the worms to climb up. I'll fill it with fresh bedding and some food and the worms will climb out of the bottom level and into the top. After a few weeks, I'll dump out all the worm castings and use it in the garden or in houseplants. It is completely odorless (well it smells like rich, moist earth, actually) and is about as good as it gets for plants.

We'll still compost yard waste, but having our worm bins in a sealed, comfy (to worms, anyway) spot in the basement will keep the local marauding fauna from messing up our recycle scene.

Next up: The Bark that Became Sawdust!