Isn't It a Shame?

Most of you will remember the tragic tale of the first great spider purge. Hours of effort were undone by a small amount of carelessness - we didn't wash the worms themselves, and in the tiny spoonful of dirt that was carried over from the first compost to the second were a handful of the spider we were trying to hard to eliminate.

Well, that handful of spiders must have been mating like bunny rabbits - by this week, the problem was back to being as bad as it was to start with; literally hundreds of these friggin tinsy tiny spiders.

Once again, I sat down with the daunting job of sorting through the compost to find and keep all the worms, but throw everything else out. With some experience under my belt, I was able to rip through things much more quickly.

For those of you that don't know this(and *I* didn't know this until yesterday), worms lay eggs/caccoons. These things are friggin small - about the size of the head of a pin. Like a tiny little bead. Each little caccoon turns into between 2 and 20 worms.

So as I'm sorting, I start to notice all this little beads....which I obviously couldn't throw out!! So needless to say, this added a whole extra level of complexity and effort to things! But I managed to save around 30 little beads, which could turn into as many as 600 worms!!