I was starting to get concerned about the worm babies that were hanging out on the ceiling of the worm box. I'm not sure if they can get down from there, and obviously there's nothing to eat. So on Wednesday, I made an effort to move them into the bedding.

They are too tiny to pick up, directly. I used a piece of newspaper shred and carefully, gently scooped them up. Eventually, they would unstick from the lid, and stick to my shred, and then I'd put her-him into a nice spot in the bedding. I probably moved about 30 or so, before I got tired and frustrated with messing with them.

When I opened up the box to feed them on Saturday, there were only three worms on the lid that were still alive. Probably 10 or 15 that were dead or non-responsive. sad. :( So I'm glad I moved most of them down.

I brought some white vinyl strips home from work. My idea was to x-acto knife some words to stick on the worm box to dress it up a little.

But I needed some words, first. "Worm House" is just so non-poetical. So I hit my Significant Other up for something clever. And he got it!

Wiggle Room

Ha! That is so totally brilliant.

Whenever I go digging in their house, I always see one or two adult worms. And they are Fat, and they wiggle because they don't like the light. I am happy to see them so healthy, but I wonder about the one pound of worms that we started with...

That one pound was a lot of worms, and I think I should be seeing more than just a couple. I wonder if the shock of moving killed them off. Or are they just hiding out at the bottom of their box.

But I always see a baby or two with the adults. And that makes me happy to see the next generation is doing it's thing.

And I'm wishing our box was bigger. I put food in one spot, for a week, and then move on to the next spot. There's room for six spots, but that's only six weeks before we get to the first spot again, and I don't think that's enough time for the food to decompose enough.

So, I'm going to try to add a spot on the long sides, so we'll have eight spots total. Which means eight weeks. We'll see how it looks then, but I don't think that's going to be enough time, either. If it's not composting, we'll have to quit feeding for a while to let the worms catch up.

Which would be a bummer, since we'll be throwing food away again. And throwing things away pisses me off. And it pisses off the earth even more.

bah. But I guess we have a few weeks before I have to worry about that. We just finished our third week.

Tag: vermicomposting

Static8 > Journal > Archive > 7 Apr 2007 Entry