Wednesday: composting worms

 I haven't talked about my composting worms in a while, but the last few months have been an adventure.

For Halloween, the boys got huge pumpkins and I put them in the composting bins.  They were too big, but I left them in there anyway.  A few weeks later they were decomposing, but not fast enough to bring the bins into the basement like I normally do in the winter.  So I left them outside and brought in the one bin that had a few worms but was mostly castings waiting for spring plants.

I killed all the worms in the garage over the winter.  The pumpkins molded.  It was a small disaster.

I put some worms from the backup container in one of the bins.  They died, probably due to the mold.

I combined the two compost bins into one.  I left that full one in the garage.  I started over with the worms from the back-up bin.  By this time I had about five worms.  If I killed them I was going to have to get more from Nathan.

They didn't die!  They got bigger.  They slowly multiplied.  Things were going well.

I finally decided to deal with the bin that was still in the garage.  I was expecting a massive, moldy mess, but to my surprise it wasn't moldy and it actually looked like pretty good compost.  While I didn't have a ton of extra worms, I threw a few worms in to see what would happen.  They lived!

So now I hopefully have two worm bins going again.  Hopefully starting from a small number of worms doesn't affect genetic diversity too much.  I'm glad to have two bins right now, because it's the middle of summer and we're going through fruit like crazy.  Isaac had a watermelon for his birthday and we made strawberry jam today.  

I'll admit, we almost make enough food scraps for a third bin.  I'm just not sure if I want to deal with it.