Saturday, February 25, 2006

Worm update

Its time to do a little worm harvesting. I attempted yesterday but my compost bin is way too wet. The compost is too sludgy to deal with trying to seperate the worms from the gold. : ) But at any rate, here's what I did:

Spread out a large tarp and dump bin on top.

Pile the compost into little piles, I had about 12 piles.

Shine light on compost so that the worms scurry (do worms scurry?) to the bottom of the pile. Worms do not like light. Once this is done, you can gently scrape the top layers of compost off. Continue this until all that is left is a pile of lovely worms. Put worms in freshly made beddng. Save compost. There are various ways to harvest your compost, but I like this way because I can see how many worms I have in my bin.

The good news is that I saw a lot of worms. I was worried about my bin and the quality of it and if my worms were thriving. Well, they are and they are eating up the garbage in massive amounts. They seem to love banana skins, which is good because we eat a lot of bananas. I often buy big bags of bananas on sale and freeze them for smoothies. I was worried the worms might get sick of them, but nope. B )

So anyway, I put the compost and worms all back into the bin. Later this weekend I am going to transfer them all to a cardboard box, which will help the dry out the soil. Then in a few weeks I will repeat above procedure. Hopefully with more success.

2 comments:

Sarah said...

I am so fascinated with this, but I'm still waffling over if I want to get some worms for us. I'm worried that I would kill them.

How come they won't eat through the cardboard box?

Julie said...

They probably could if I left them in there for a long time. But they will be in the box just long enough to help the soil dry out. There will be plenty of other easily digestable options in the bin so the cardboard should be fine for awhile. : ) And I am constantly worrying about killing my worms. : )