Isn't It a Shame?

For the past 3 weeks my life has been spent tending for worms. Yes, like the little red wriggly kind.

For one rason or another I got it in my head that worm composting would be a jolly good time. Good for the environment, and fun for me.

I eventually was able to find someone in Toronto to buy worms from - a much more involved task than I'd originally thought, and also much more expensive - $27 for 1/2 pound of red wrigglers.

Anyways, for a while, all was good in worm land. I bought a big rubbermaid big to store my compost in, which fit nicely under the kitchen sink. Within a week I'd amassed quite a collection of banana peels, orange rinds, apple cores, egg shells and what have you. Was quite surprising really how much organic material one throws out. The worms were churning away and everything seemed good.

Then two things happened to forever change the path of worm composting here in this little apartment.

i) I decided to bring some leaves in from outside to add to the compost. Well, I must have pick a bad leaf - as within days these intsy bitsy spiders had taken over the compost. They were everywhere. At first I thought I might stand a chance at killing them off individually. Boy was I wrong.

ii) My online research indicated that worms like bread. So an old stale bagel was dutifully cut up and added to the heap. was THAT ever a mistake! This big puffy white mould started growing . And I mean this mould was GROWING. Like, there'd be nothing in the morning when i went to work, and I'd come back at night and there'd be an inch thick of mould everywhere. Gross++.

These two unfortunate events led to me basically disassembling the compost item by item, so I could start from scratch, keeping just the worms. This process took almost 4 hours, as the worms are quite hard to find/catch. Eventually, I had a little container full of worms, and everything else was clean and mould/spider free.

I rebuilt my composter(you need clean dirt, newspaper, foodscraps, etc) and went to add my container of worms. Almost like it was happening in slow motion, I dumped the worms over onto the new compost...and realized "oh shizzat, I didn't clean the worms...". Out of the corner of my eye, in the tablespoon or so of dirt that was bundled over with the worms, I see 2 little spiders, scurry off into the new compost.

So, potentially all that work for naught. Right now we're waiting, and holding out hope.

# posted by Greg @ 5:15 AM