Squirmy Update
I think the worms are trying my patience. They haven’t reproduced very quickly that I can tell (but who can tell? I haven’t actually counted them) and they seem to be fairly slow eaters. I’ve read about the different ways that people prepare the worm food; kitchen scraps, etc. but I’m just not into cutting things up extremely small or running food scraps through the blender. These guys will just have to deal with portion size.
The first bucket that we started was just about ready to “harvest” meaning that there was not that much food left in it. I rotated the empty bucket up to the top of the stack and made sure that there was enough bedding to touch the bottom of the new top bucket. It’s been at least two weeks since I started with the new top bucket and the bottom – not as nearly finished as I thought – has most of the worms in it. There is still plenty of bedding – the ripped up newspaper – in the bottom bucket. They will have to keep chewing along until there is nothing left.
In news from the buckets at the communal garden, the first set was definitely ready to rotate. I’m hoping to harvest around 4 gallons of castings for fertilizer. Of course those guys have to crawl out of the bottom bucket too. J&A don’t dig in the buckets over there as much as I dig in mine, they feed sporadically and just maybe a little more sparsely than I do mine. The first bucket looks like it’s full of worms and castings – maybe I should leave mine alone more too? Nah, not gonna happen.
In other wormy news
Digging around on the internet looking for information on worm composting I found sites that suggested schools could save money by composting kitchen and cafeteria waste and forwarded lots of information to the elementary principal. Last week I found a news article titled Wiggler Power which talks about a worm composting experiment here in town at Flagstaff High School. I’m hoping to start a minor trend.
