worm update

Yesterday I tried to give my composting worms a brand new, bigger home. It seemed that they had eaten their way through all the bedding and veggie scaps we had provided. Basically, the worm box looked full of only worms and worm poop.

My book told me the best way to separate the two was to dump everything out on a plastic sheet, form conical piles, and shine a light so the worms all move down to the center and bottom of each pile. That did not work for me.

My worms (thousands and thousands by now) didn't mind the light as much as they should have and pretty much stayed just under the surface. They seemed to like gathering around clumps of not-quite decomposed food and bedding. The egg shells I should have crushed were particularly pleasing to them, as were the tops of bell peppers.

Consequently, Sam and I spent a few hours grabbing handfuls of bedding/decomposing food/worm poop/worms and attempting to separate it all. After awhile, we gave up trying to pick out the quarter inch long baby worms from their mass of friends and food and just started transferring any clump that didn't have old food or paper in it to the new bin.

Ultimately, we ended up with our hands covered in worm poop and squiggling worms. We didn't really harvest any of the poop; we put worms we could easily grap into the new bin and put everything else back into the old bin to give it a bit more time. Here's hoping that the next time we do this, the worms will cooperate better and we'll get ourselves some wonderful worm fertilizer.

p.s. I was going to take a picture of the craziness that is a 3ft by 3ft plastic sheet of writhing worms, but by then my hands were covered in worm poop, and I didn't think everyone would appreciate that scene, anyway.