Who would have thought I could get so excited about getting worms but I couldn’t contain myself when I did!
In an area like ours which doesn’t recycle anywhere near as much as it should I want to cut down on what I send to landfill. I had been thinking for a while that although we have our compost piles at the allotment it is not always easy or convenient to cart our kitchen waste over there every day. Which meant we collected it in bins, which should have been taken to the allotment but rarely were. So now I have rows of composting bins along the back wall of the garden in varying stages of decomposition, attracting flies in the warm weather or the occasional nocturnal vermin. Not to mention the dog rifling through the remains just in case we’ve chucked in something tasty. This system works to a degree but the main issue is not the pests but the time it takes for the waste to turn into compost. The only result I’ve had so far is the dark brown, foul smelling goop produced by the decomposition which makes a good liquid plant feed. My one and only surviving house plant; a spider plant; thrives on the stuff.
It was back in September after a day out to the beach where the kids were so fascinated by the lugworms they found that we completed a topic on worms, looking at the different species of worms, the jobs they did and how important they are in keeping our soil healthy. In fact, did you know that worms are as important as bees? This topic sparked my curiosity about using worms to compost our kitchen waste and towards the back end of last year, I came across an article in a well known gardening magazine all about the subject. Apparently, once set up, you can feed them almost anything from your kitchen with only a very few exceptions. “Wow!” I thought, “this is just what I need.” Over the winter months I read more articles on worm composting and researched all the different wormeries on offer. The one I liked the best was the wormery from Worm City as it was compact tiered tray system which looked easy to set up and use. Plus it was British made. I became so enthused by the idea that Paul accused me of sounding like a broken record every time I mentioned the subject. I thought it best to wait until the worse of the winter was over since worms hibernate when it is too cold and would take longer to settle. I finally took the plunge at the end of February and ordered my wormery plus 500g of worms and waited in eager anticipation. They arrived three weeks ago
I was woken early that Thursday morning by Paul calling from downstairs that my worms were here. I shot out of bed and was downstairs in seconds to investigate. I hastily unpacked the wormery and read the accompanying instructions. There wasn’t much I could do until I’d gathered up some old newspaper, which was needed to cover the worms once they were in place. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the pandemic, the free weekly paper delivery has stopped so, despite a thorough search round the house, not a shred of newspaper was to be found. I phoned Netti to see if she had any, to no avail. She did, however, need to sent the kids to the local shop so they could pick up a couple of newspapers whilst they were there. Whilst I waited for my newspaper to arrive I started setting up the wormery. I put the bedding, a coir block, into a bucket of water to expand whilst I constructed the wormery. After squeezing the excess water from the bucketful of coir, which I spread out in the bottom of the first tray before tipping the writhing mass of worms from their bag and sprinkling some worm food around them. Once I had the newspaper I posted it through the shredder, plunged it into the bucket of water, squeezed it out and spread it over the worms as directed before placing the lid on the wormery, which now resides in the stable. Later that night I got a phone call from Netti; who could hardly speak for laughing. When Harry had asked why they needed to fetch me a newspaper Netti had replied that it was because Granny had worms. Apparently he’d spent the rest of the day trying to work out what good newspaper was if I had worms. She had had to explain to him that I didn’t have worms like the puppy but had a wormery with special worms that would eat all my rubbish.
On the first morning Paul, “it’s nothing to do with me,” checked the worms to find we had a bit of worm wander since there was a whole bunch of the little blighters in the lid. This went on for about a week and I was a bit worried that the newspaper was too damp and cold for the worms since we’d had a sudden cold snap. To counteract the chill temperatures the wormery now gets wrapped in a blanket at night. A week later they all decided to wander down into the sump so I filled that up with newspaper and sprinkled some worm food in the tray to encourage them to move back into their bedding. As we’ve been checking on them we’ve noticed some tiny little worms appearing so it looks like any eggs that came with them have hatched and their numbers are increasing. This week I put the first handful of kitchen waste into the tray. The temperatures are still a bit on the low side so they may still be a little sluggish so we will just have to wait and see how they get on as the weather warms up.
