We Have WORMS!
My Aunt Kathy and I had been emailing back and forth and we started talking about our gardens, starting our seeds indoors, and composting. One thing led to another and she surprised us by sending us a big worm farm that eats your garbage and turns it into compost! The boys were ecstatic! They counted down the days until our worms arrived. The farm arrived before the worms, which allowed us to read the book that came with it.
The drain at the bottom is for the compost “tea” that the worms make…also known as worm pee! You dilute it one part ‘tea’ to one part water and your house plants will love you forever!
To prepare the farm for the worms, we read the book, shredded newspaper for ‘bedding’, collected our kitchen scraps in our cute little compost bucket for a few days, and soaked the coir (the hair from the outside of a coconut) in water for the first batch of ‘bedding’.
Then the big day arrived. We were suppose to get the worms in the mail last Thursday, but instead we received a phone call from the post office informing us that we’d need to go pick them up. I went to pick them up and they couldn’t find them!! I informed them that I had six anxious children waiting on this package and then I told him what was in the package! Still no luck. I went home and looked up the tracking number online, called the post office again, and someone finally found the package, which was sitting on a supervisor’s desk. Long story short, someone made a personal trip to my house when they got off at 5:00 to deliver our worms. They came in this little white pouch:
One pound of little red worms. I read in the book that there are an average of 600-700 worms in a one pound bag. I didn’t believe it…until I dumped them in!!
When these little guys arrived, they were as skinny as an uncooked spaghetti noodle. Now, almost one week later, they are as big around as a pencil and loving their new home. We have yet to receive a drop of tea, but they sure are going through the garbage quickly! We’re suppose to feed them twice a week until our first tray is full and then leave it alone and let the worms work their magic. It has a total of five garbage trays, but it takes several months to add all of those trays. The trays have little holes in the bottom and as you add a new tray of garbage, the worms migrate upward into the new tray. It’s actually VERY cool!
Here is what we put in our worm farm on a regular basis:
fruit and veggie scraps–minus citrus peels, which the worms don’t like very much
tea bags and coffee filters, along with the coffee grains and tea leaves
cream of wheat
oatmeal
left over scraps in the fridge that are no longer good enough to eat (as long as it doesn’t contain meat)
NO dairy
NO meat
The cool thing about our farm is that it doesn’t smell and doesn’t attract insects. Josh says it will not come inside, but I don’t think he’ll have a choice when the hot summer months get here. The worms will die if they get too hot. In nature, when the weather gets super hot, worms can go deeper underground. But in our worm farm, they don’t have anywhere to go to escape the heat. For now, their home is in the garage. 🙂
Thank you Aunt Kathy! We love our worms! If we get really bored this summer, we’ll take the top off and begin to name them. Hahaha!
~audrey