As you may already know, I have a small colony of worms. I say small because the worm bin that they live in is small enough for me to be able to lift; there is grunting and huffing involved. These little guys have been around for over 2 years through all of my neglect and abuse. I mean really, I'm waiting to wake up to a Gulliver's Travels moment where they revolt, tie me down, and demand timely feedings, roughage additions and poo harvesting.
I started with this colony, after taking a vermiculture workshop at my local CSA. I had been promised worms, however apparently the guy who supplied them had had a catastrophic boiler explosion in his basement, which had cooked all of his worms.Granted you can buy "red wigglers" pretty easily, go to a bait and tackle shop, or heck, just look online, however, I'm a product of the instant gratification generation and kept putting off putting in an order. Luckily for me a friend, lets call her Lena, had just inherited the colony from her next door neighbor. So... one fine Memorial Day weekend, I came home with a small Tupperware container of dirt, half eaten newspaper, and a fistful of worms.
I really didn't think these guys were going to survive. For one thing, I left them in the container for several days. Second, I transplanted them into a homemade contraption with included 2 plastic containers stacked together, (the interior container had a bunch of air holed drilled in for drainage and air flow), which lived under the kitchen sink. These plastic boxes were probably about 4"x8", I swear I was going to transplant them into a bigger box, but the one I had built was wooden, and I just didn't trust it not to get messed with on my front lawn. Fortunately for me, my wedding was about 3 months away, and my family screamed for a wedding registry. Being slightly twisted, I put a worm bin on my wedding registry; and got one!
The tiny colony of worms was soon transplanted into a massive 12"x12" box, which I filled with shredded news paper, dirt and food scraps. At the time I had a landing I could use for storage, where I kept the bin, however when I moved into my new place, these little guys had to come indoors.
Several days ago, when I originally started writing this post, I had just fed my little colony the remnants of a watermelon. This morning I woke up to a mini flood of brown liquid seeping out over the top lip of the bottom section of the bin. Apparently the watermelon raised the moisture level to some horrifying extremes. I sopped up the mess with some paper towels and threw them back into the bin, andadded a bunch more shredded newspaper. I also opened up the draining spout at the bottom of the bin to let the remaining liquid drain out into a jar. Here's hoping the watermelon flood of 2012 does not actually do any lasting damage to these little guys...
Good news-they're worms. They can survive anything but drowning and they know to go to higher ground when the watermelon river rises.
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