The Worms, Reloaded

The Venerable Friendly One is having a cup of tea on a glorious afternoon here, north of the 48th parallel. A rest break is in order. Today's forecast called for 61°F today. It is now 68. No clouds. It's just past 3:00PM and the PV array is still pumping out more than 3KW of power.

It seems to be a perfect time to chat with The Wrong Rock for a bit.

"Why a rest," you ask? Well, I have just spent about 4 hours futzing (that's a technical term applied to clueless urban farmers) with my worm bin. It's been clear for weeks that the worms were not thriving, so today was allocated to:

1. Investigating
2. Diagnosing
3. Improving

...the habitat of the worms.

Now this delightful activity was best performed in the basement – the finished part of the basement. "Why," you ask?

Well, worms don't like bright light. So if you dump the contents of their bin in a place with bright light, they'll burrow away from the light. This reflex on the part of the worms make it easier to herd them. You just keep brushing the worm bedding around and the worms keep burrowing. Eventually you can separate the two. The finished part of the basement has a wall lined with windows. When the blinds are up, it's bright in there. Not basement-like at all.

It's cold and dark in the unfinished part of the basement. Carrying loaded worm bins up and down the stairs wasn't that appealing. That left the finished part of the basement.

So I found a giant piece of cardboard and laid it beneath the windows of the basement. Then I placed several sheets of newspaper on the cardboard. Then I opened the worm bin and dumped the contents onto said newspaper.

Immediately, I was able to diagnose at least one of the problems with the worms' habitat. It was too wet. Food was moldy and stinky. So was some of the shredded newspaper. The whole thing was a slimy, stinky mess. I took the worm bin pieces out to the garden and hosed them off so they were clean.

Now I have read that cardboard is a good component for worm bedding, so I snagged a nice box from Angel's stash of potential shipping boxes. No color printing. Check. Pretty clean. Check.

I cut this box up in a couple of different ways. First of all, I cut one piece that would just about cover the bottom of the worm bin insert. That's the place where the worms live. It's got a bunch of holes in the bottom and you need to have something to keep the worm bedding from falling through the holes into the bottom tank. I sprayed this piece of cardboard with water from the garden hose (not too wet!) and placed it in the bottom of the bin.

Then I cut the rest of the nice clean cardboard into strips. I made a sort of woven "place mat" thing with cardboard strips and wetted that too.

Next I got some new bedding. I decided that my first try was too easy to compact and get gooey, so this time I decided to try to reproduce something closer to a worm's natural habitat (whatever the heck that might be). We still have some organic compost that we used in the main garden. We also have some of the soil that I took from the garden and strained to remove the rocks. Finally, we have some sawdust from my adventure with the chipper/shredder.

All three piles have been sitting out in the weather. It rained pretty heavily last week, so when I dug down a couple of feet into each pile, I found nice moist stuff. This is what I used for my worm bedding.

I mixed some of all three (compost, earth, and sawdust) together, emphasizing the compost, and placed a couple of inches of this mixture in the bottom of the worm bin. Then I laid the damp "place mat" on top of that and added some more mixture. Then the remaining damp strips of cardboard, peeled to make them thinner and (one hopes) tastier and easier to eat. I topped off the bedding with another inch or so of the compost-earth-sawdust mixture.

I did this whole thing in the place in the basement where the worm bin stays. This new bedding was both deeper and heavier than the original. It is moist, but not wet. It is not sticky and smells pretty much like moist earth.

Next I tackled the stinking mess on the floor of the basement.

Over the next few hours, I pawed through the stuff, looking for living worms. Each time I found one, I carefully cradled the worm in the palm of my left hand while I continued pawing with my right. Much of this was done kneeling on the floor (wood over concrete... padded by the edge of the big piece of cardboard). Sometimes I sat on the floor. After a while I realized that I could spot living worms better if I wore some of my reading glasses.

Each time I got 10 or 20 worms out of the mess, I carefully transferred them to the new bedding.

Oh, and I wore some latex gloves while I did this. I just couldn't see any benefit to smearing my skin with slime. This whole process was sort of smelly. Even now, I'm slightly nauseous, but it's getting better.

After a few hours, I had separated hundreds of worms from the old bedding. Clearly, the old environment wasn't as toxic as I'd feared, but it clearly wasn't that comfy for the worms. I found full size red wrigglers, significantly smaller red wrigglers, and what I'm pretty sure were baby red wrigglers. These last worms were paler in color and tiny, but they were shaped just like and moved just like their larger brethren. I am choosing to be optimistic here. Hopefully they are not the larvae of some kind of alien invaders.

Some (peripheral) good news: I am still able to get down on the floor and get up, over and over, for hours at a time. It's not as fun as it was when I was a child, however.

In the process of sifting through the muck, I also encountered some tiny spiders and what looked like an earwig or two. I didn't transfer those to the new bedding. At the end of the whole thing, I swept up. I didn't make too much of a mess, so it was only a matter of 20 minutes or so to clean up.

Now the worms are safely bedded down in their new quarters. I hope these are more suitable and that the worms thrive. I must say that so far, vermiculture has been much more challenging for me than regular old composting. I just read the wikipedia article on "Vermicompost" and it seems just as simple in theory as it originally did. Oh, well. I suspect that the new bedding is a bit deeper than it needs to be, but probably this will be okay. I hope so anyway.

For the next few weeks, my plan is to emphasize things like lettuce leaves that are too funky to go in a salad, finely chopped vegetable trimmings, and things like that. I will put these on the surface of the new bedding. This is much less aggressive than the articles on vermiculture say, but after the first experience, I need to take this slowly.