Tuesday, January 22, 2008

A Day in the Life...

Of a Worm Composter
I came home today after a long day sitting in a small alternately stuffy, alternately cold box, with very little freedom to move about of my own volition, to find a puzzlement on the floor of my front side room. Precisely, it looked like the dogs had shredded some plant material and there were "twigs" scattered hither and yon - or perhaps, some type of dried noodle. Odd I thought. Closer inspection revealed that the trail of twigs led to my large worm tote in the corner - up on the bottom utility shelf. Uh-oh.

Yes, indeed. The twigs were piled high and deep under the shelf. In fact, they were not twigs at all, but dessicated worms.

I had had a worm explosion.
This is when conditions in the worm compost container reach optimum for maximum worm fecundity. I popped the top with trepidation.

The worms were everywhere. Big wriggling blobs of red goo. They festooned every edge of the tote - hundreds of thousands of them. The smell of worm reproduction at its most powerful was enough to wrinkle the noses of even the least discerning amongst my copraphagic dogs. It wafted throughout the house - necessitating incense. I washed the worms back down into their tote, threw in some more food, covered the whole mess with shredded newspaper, and smushed the lid back on.

I took the philosophical approach. After all, if they didnt have enough food when all was said and done, they could compost each other.

7 comments:

subarctic mama said...

I had worms for a few years, but never got so lucky as to have an explosion.

CabinDweller said...

Oh. My. Gawd. Gawdess. Whatever.

So, this is what I might have had to deal with had I taken you up on the offer of worms for my own household?

You implied a degree of low maintenance-ness. The photos below give lie to that implication.

Theresa said...

So, did the worms get all snuggly over the holidays? Will they be named after Santa's reindeer? What does it take to get these little wrigglers in a "fecund" mood? Thanks for the photos. I never woulda believed it.

Steve said...

This is inside I presume. I've composted summers and then reverted to the garbage disposal after the frost. But I feel terrible not saving the scraps. Can you give us pictures of the whole set up? Where do you keep it, what do you 'feed' it?

Also, was going to ask by email, but couldn't find a link. How do you get your blogger page to fill up almost the whole browser page? And the header picture to do the same? My blog could be a lot shorter if it were wider like yours. My email links in my profile. Thanks.

CabinDweller said...

Well, Flic will have to answer/post about her super worm producing set up.

As for the blogger page - you have to go into the template and tinker with the css language - and it's kind of annoying. But it can be done, and if you really muss things up you can just revert to the original setup. There is a lot of info online about how to alter the blogger templates.

Super Smooth ANDY-G said...

Flic..

...bleepidy...bleep...bleep..bleep, in that order. I've had similar experiences in the past, but I've been here a long time and have never seen that before.

..come on...whats going one...come on..

Cathy said...

Good greif that was just nasty. Yer gonna let me mugak my morning kupaaq.