WORMS, WORMS, WORMS.

“Or things I learned while killing annelids in the pursuit of green garbage disposal and other things of a touchy feely warm and fuzzy nature.” No the worms are not the warm or fuzzy part.

I read how composting with worms is the new environmentally sensitive way to recycle your garbage and household waste. It’s lovely. Any one can do it. You can do it in your back hall. All you need is a plastic tub, your table scraps, some worms and voila, instant gardening soil. And the worms will reproduce and make lots more worms so you’ll never have to worry about a thing.

First of all, a plastic bin of table scraps is really a pile of garbage and a pile of garbage stinks and your mother really won’t like a stinking pile of garbage in her back hall. Trust me on this one.

Worms and where to get them. You can collect them from your garden. Yeah sure. You need a whole lot of them. If your garden has that many worms you don’t need a worm box. There is a significant ick factor. Don’t try to get a girl over the age of six to help you. They’ll hunch up their shoulders, maybe pick up one with their fingers and immediately find something they just have to do somewhere else. Boys are good till about thirteen, but after that they’re pretty much useless anyway. Face it, you are on your own. You can buy them at the bait store. They come in nice environmentally friendly Styrofoam containers but no problem. It is nice and convenient to take the lid off and dump them in. The price you will pay is designed for Bubba the fisherman and at 10 or 20 containers you’ll start wondering about the cost effectiveness of just buying some potting soil.

Night crawlers, those nice big fat worms that look like they could eat a cob of corn all by themselves, that will fill up the bin quick, are solitary animals that really don’t like their own kind. They don’t do well in close confined spaces. What you want is Georgia red worms. They like to live in a big writhing mass. Ick factor times ten. Now you might find them at the hardware store in the bait bin, or if you know someone in Georgia who can go dig them up out of her garden you’ll be set. Or you could travel to Georgia but then the cost of that will have you thinking of just buying more gardening soil. Eventually I bought some from “Garden’s Alive” catalog and they showed up in the mail. Not particularly cheap but quick and convenient. They also sell worm eggs and encapsulated worm eggs. I don’t know the advantage of either but it definitely takes some time from the eggs to functional garbage disposal. I’m not pushing that particular supplier, it is the only one I have found. They also sell compost inoculant to get the decomposition going.

Worm tea. That wonderful liquid stuff that comes out of the worm bin. It is really the stinky liquid part of garbage that your mom REALLY doesn’t like in her back hall. It is the liquid portion of the food and worm pee and is supposed to be wonderful for potted plants. It accumulates in the bottom of the bin and when you come back from a long weekend all your worms are drowned. When you start over you’ll need to install a drain valve. Unless you are good with building things and sealants, you will get to buy a special ‘worm friendly’ bin for your new batch of worms that will be arriving in the mail any day.

The instructions that come with the new batch of worms say you can keep them in wet shredded newspaper until your worm box is ready. My third batch got put into a couple of plant pots with newspaper. I also had a couple of pots of new tomatoes next to them. When I went to put the worms in the box, I got gypped, there weren’t nearly the worms I thought I should have. When I went to plant the tomatoes I found out why. The worms had voted with their feet in the middle of the night, or their little filarial. None of this newspaper crap for them.

Somewhere in all this I moved to California. I got a big metal box, that was supposed to be bear proof, set it up outside, put in some garbage and the latest batch of worms and promptly killed them. The California sun baked them all.

My next move was to drill 8 large holes in the back of the box and dig it into the ground so the top is up. The worms can migrate up and down into the food or down into the ground as the temperature changes. This has worked well and the worms have survived now for 10 years and a move to a new house. I open the lid, dump in the waste and close it. The lid keeps the bears, dogs and raccoons out of the garbage. It is worth noting that a fully functioning worm box composter will fully decompose a raccoon in about two weeks.

Other stuff to go in the box. My composter gets lawn mower clippings and shredded leaves in the spring and fall and turned over whenever I think of it. Occasionally and I stress that word, it gets some manure from a 4H pig. Remember the usefulness of teenage boys. Cat litter boxes can also emptied into it. Don’t however allow the teenage girl to just dump the whole thing into it, cause it is gross. The big pile of litter clumps up into a mass that doesn’t decompose worth a damn. I am at a point where I need to get some new worms. If I only knew someone with a garden in Georgia.