In the middle of your living room floor, a tarp. It’s not the chintzy thin blue kind, the kind that you see on the highway, untucked from its moorings, waving itself to ribbons. No, you shelled out the extra cash for the good tarp, the heavy-duty tarp, the silver on one side, brown on the other tarp. When you unfold it, it crinkles in a lower octave than the blue tarps. It means business. Of course, this particular job doesn’t necessarily require the good tarp, but it certainly never hurts to go for quality, right?
Living room, floor, tarp. And, on the tarp, a small mountain. It’s mostly dark, that black-brown you see on animal coats or wet wood. Here and there, a fragment of old newsprint or a shunned beet end, stubbornly sprouting. And, as they wriggle back into the pile, the glitter of light on moist worm hide. Some are fat and red, but some are tiny–pale, hair-thin creatures you wouldn’t notice except for the way they undulate their bodies. Is it crazy to feel this flush of maternal pride over worm babies?
It’s not until you catch yourself talking to the worms–out loud and utterly in earnest–that it occurs to you that this might not be how most people spend their Monday nights.
An authority on worm composting, Miss Mary the Worm Woman recommends a bedding change at around six weeks. That milestone for my worms passed, um, six weeks ago. But I haven’t been completely lax: at about week eight or so, I got a second bin, drilled it like the first, with drainage holes in the bottom and ventilation holes around the top, filled it with fresh bedding, and nestled it inside the first bin so it was resting directly on the bedding. The theory–and it would seem a sound one–goes like this: as you add food only to the top (new) bin, the worms will finish eating the dregs left in the old bin and then gradually follow their (noses? crack kitchen-scrap-aura detection skills?) through the drainage holes and into the new bin. Rich, lovely, ready-to-use compost in old bin; worms happily munching away in new bin–easy, peasy. Miss Mary says this is a slow but sure process, usually taking 1-2 months.
Well, I got a little impatient. And, in retrospect, this was (for once) a good thing. After a few weeks of taking the lazy lady’s approach to bedding change, I couldn’t detect any sign that a massive worm migration was underway. Were the holes too small or too scarce? Was there not enough contact between old bedding surface and the bottom of the new bin? Had my worms grown attached to their first home, and were loath to leave it? Were they plagued by anosmia? Immune to auras? Hodophobic? I’m not sure. What I do know is that there were slimy, rotting things in the bottom of the new bin when I opened it, and no worms. Time for plan B.
And so, the tarp.
After hosing out the new bin, I hand-shredded some new bedding, then upended the old bin’s contents onto the tarp. I must admit to an illogical concern: though I know worms tend to move away from light and thus are not likely to set out across the wilderness of a brightly lit living room just for grins, I couldn’t help but wonder if the trauma of eviction might inspire a Fugitive-type scenario. The bin rolls over and dumps out its worms much like Harrison Ford got dumped out of that bus. Stung by the injustice of it all, the worms sprint for freedom. We have a few close calls and near misses, in which I almost nab one before it jumps off a spillway and I nearly catch another but it dons a green bowler hat and slips into the crowd. The dogs would no doubt volunteer to be my fellow U.S. Marshals, though I don’t recall Tommy Lee Jones’s buddies eating any prisoners in the film. The ending would be happy, with the worms vindicated but still tucked safely away into their new bin. This, however, was far more excitement than I was looking for on this night.
Thankfully, the worms didn’t really seem to notice that anything was amiss. The submitted to being dumped out onto the good tarp, pawed at, talked to, gushed over, gingerly picked up, and deposited into their new bin. They haven’t brought it up again since.
A word about what my worms have made: Some folks might want to pull on gloves for an endeavor such as this. Not me. While I saw firsthand how foul veggie scraps can get when they languish worm-less, what happens to them in the worm-ful bin is remarkable. The resulting compost is dense but light, moist and crumbly, with a texture that reminded me of an especially decadent chocolate desert I had once, that resided somewhere on the spectrum of indulgence between a mousse and a torte. I didn’t taste any of the worm compost (I swear!), but I did smell it, and more than once. It smelled like a garden. And, if my seedlings keep growing, it will be.
Which is all simply to say that I’m counting my first foray into worm composting a success. It’s proven to be inexpensive to get started, easy to maintain, tolerant of a little benign neglect, and well worth the time and effort. It’s got a good beat, I could dance to it, and, yes, I would recommend it to a friend. Maybe you could use a few more worms in your life?
Final note: Yeah, you’d think this post would be ripe for some photos. You’d be right, too. A mightier blogger would attend to your need to see the good tarp, laden with its compost mountain and worm fugitives. This one begs your forbearance, and hopes her prose did the trick. I mean, aren’t you having visions of worms just reading this?
I really need to get a camera.
If visual stimulation is what you require, you could do worse than this:
Worm Farmer George is a hoot, he’s got one of them thar fancy worm bins, and he gives a good peek at what finished worm compost looks like. “Believe in the worm,” indeed.
