The Worm Saga (My First Adventures in Vermicomposting)

The tenants in our apartment building started our first urban garden this April. One of the first decisions we made was that it would be an organic garden.

When I hear "organic garden" I think "compost." When the maintenance crew hears "compost," they think "rats." Big hairy rats, that we already have a constant battle with around the garbage bins. And other tenants think "compost=rotting garbage=stink." And I think, "Whole lot of work to keep a compost bin active and healthy and rat-free."

Then I read that composting with worms yields a higher-quality fertilizer in shorter time and with less odor. I liked the idea of "worm wrangling," and it didn't take a lot of work to get the rest of the folks to let me try it.

It took me three weeks to work out how I could afford it. I couldn't build my own bin: I'd be as likely to nail my hand to the wall as nail two boards together. I couldn't expect building maintenance to build one for me. The worm bins in the online catalogs cost anywhere from more than I could afford to lots more than I could afford. The worms I needed for composting weren't nightcrawlers I could pick up in the back yard. The recommended worms for vermicomposting (composting with worms) are called "red wrigglers" and they cost more, pound for pound, than Belgian chocolate.  (Besides, we don't have a back yard. The dirt in our raised bed garden was trucked in, and it was pretty sterile. I'd seen two worms in the whole 70 square feet, and I wanted them to stay there and breed.)

I finally found worms at $40 for two pounds from Happy D Ranch, and a 14-gallon green plastic worm bin from GreenCulture for $32.50. I ordered both on May 18. All the advice I read said to get the worm bin and get it set up before you order your worms, but I was too impatient. "Oh well," I thought blithely, "if the worms get here before the bin does, they can surely survive in a cardboard box of dirt for just a few days."

I was already accumulating food to feed my worms: a five-pound bag of used coffee grounds from Starbucks and an almost equal amount of old fruit, vegetables, stale bread and eggshells. Worms could eat half their weight per day, I'd read: I was ready to feed them a pound a day for two weeks.

My worms arrived on Thursday, May 24. The bin had not yet arrived. And the only cardboard box I had to try my bright idea was the Flat Rate Parcel box they came in.

The two pounds of worms came in a bag of peat moss, with a layer of newspaper under it and a layer of newspaper over it. I took all that out of the box. The newspaper still had a trace of moisture in it; I soaked it, along with other newspaper I'd been collecting, and tore it up into shreds. I took the packing tape off the box on the theory that would let in more air, which is supposed to be very important. I put a couple of inches of damp newspaper in the box and fluffed it up. I covered that with about two inches of mixed compost and potting soil (3 parts compost to 1 part potting soil) and moistened that. Then I dumped the bag of worms-and-peat on top of the soil, poked at the peat a bit to try to level it out, and sprinkled some more compost-and-potting-soil over them. I covered that with another inch of damp shredded newspaper. Then I thought they might still not have enough air, so I grabbed a paring knife and stabbed a dozen holes in all four sides.

I then eagerly began pureeing collected worm-foods into a blender full of mush. The mush was very liquid. I was afraid that if I poured it over the worm bed I'd drown the worms. I mixed in about three pounds of coffee grounds and it was still pretty wet. Somewhere I'd read that mixing a bit of compost and some shredded paper in the food would be a good idea, so I began mixing in compost and shredded paper. By the end, I had a two gallon pot full of what my husband (when he got home) promptly dubbed "buffalo shit."

I took off the top layer of newspaper and laid in an inch of food, then covered up everything with the newspaper again. This only lowered the pot to level with the rim, making it barely possible to slip it into the refrigerator.

The instructions that came with the worms advised leaving a light on over the worms for the first few days. They avoid light, so this encourages them to stay in their new home long enough to get used to it. So my husband came home to a box of worms in the middle of the bedroom, a pot of buffalo shit in the refrigerator, and a very very dirty kitchen floor. And counter. And wife.

I was anxious that the worms not starve. They were going to eat a pound of food a day, after all. I kept checking them every few hours, and whenever I saw a worm in the current food, I'd add a little more. I also kept probing the box to check temperature and moisture level. The peat layer kept heating up. I'd stir it around a little to cool it down.

At bedtime, I put the box in the bathroom, turned on the light, and shut the door. The next morning I found a few tiny dried sticks of worm on the bathroom floor, none more than a foot from the box -- they dry out quickly. The peat was heating up again. Not much of the food seemed to have been eaten. I was afraid there was too thick a layer of food, that was causing the box to heat up like a compost heap; so I stirred the food, compost, and some of peat all up together. The worms seemed to still be in a few large clumps, not spread out much. Maybe now they'd find food closer to them and get the idea to eat.

The sun was out now, so I had the idea that we could save some electricity by moving the box back out to the bedroom and turning off the bathroom light. I had the box sitting on a layer of paper sack and newspaper so that I could drag it; the bottom would flop open if I picked it up, because I'd taken off the packing tape so the worms could breathe better. I checked the worms every few hours, adding just a bit of food each time because I didn't want them to starve, and stirring the box every now and then to dissipate the heat that was still building up.

Late Friday evening, I was sitting at the computer when my husband stomped in saying there was worm shit all over the bedroom floor. He had found the box in the middle of the room when he wanted to go to bed, and picked it up to put it back in the bathroom. And the bottom dropped out.

So I reassembled the worm-box, put it in the bathroom, cleaned up the floor; and at this point, I decided to leave the pan of worm-food (aka buffalo shit) in the bathroom too, because the worms would be less annoyed by their food becoming more rotten than my husband was annoyed by the horrid stuff in the refrigerator.

Saturday morning I had to leave my worm babies alone to go to a Raging Granny meeting. I had a plan to improve their condition. After the meeting I went across to Trader Joe's and asked them for a cardboard box; the biggest they had was a wine box, but it was at least bigger then the parcel post box. I stopped at the Garden Store for a new bag of peat moss. Once back at the office, I soaked the peat moss, then drained it (and gave the resulting dark-brown-water-with-a-bit-of-peat to the woman who waters the office plants). I lined the box with some damp newspaper, then dumped in the damp peat moss.

There were still a few worms escaping from the box, and none of them seemed to be eating well. I had the idea that since they came in peat moss, they may be used to that kind of bedding, and they'd be happier if I gave them a peat moss bed. And the parcel post bed was beginning to smell sour; I was afraid it had developed "anaerobic bacteria," which the instructions said was very very bad.

Water seeped out from around the wine box. I was glad it would have a few hours to sit, so that excess water would drain out. I put a pad of newspaper under it to absorb excess water, and under the newspapers I put an old and ragged poster from one of our ad campaigns; it wasn't shiny, but it was thick and sturdy. To carry the whole thing home at the end of the day, I picked it up carefully by the posterboard and set it into a superlarge plastic sack from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

At home, I sat down in the bathroom with the new box on one side and the old box on the other. I began carefully skimming off the contents of the old box, sifting for worms, putting the worms in the new box and the rest in a large paper sack, until I had worked down to the level of mostly peat moss. Then I dumped everything left into the new box, added a thin layer of food, and covered it with several layers of wet newspaper.

I took the bag of mixed compost, peat moss, and half-digested worm food out to the garden and piled it at the far end, which isn't planted yet. I covered it with a thin skim of dirt. I figured what I had was half-processed compost, and it could finish composting there, where we wouldn't be planting anything for a few more months.

I dumped the pan of buffalo shit, still three-quarters full, in the garbage. It had started to really stink, and I began thinking that what I had there was a very wet compost heap that had gone bad.

Sunday morning, however, there were a few more worms trying to escape, and the box still smelled sour. But the front desk said I had a package, and it was the worm bin! It had arrived Saturday, but nobody told me!

I didn't have much time, because I was due at the Folklife Festival to perform with Raging Grannies. I hurriedly laid the stack of wet newspapers that had been the box cover on the bottom of the new bin, then lifted the box by the poster under it and laid it in the middle of the bin. I ripped down the sides of the box and tore up some of that wet cardboard to scatter around for additional bedding, scattered in just a bit of fresh-mixed food, put the lid on, and took off for Seattle Center.

Wes and I came home about five hours later; he headed for the computer and I headed for the worm bin. When I opened it, worms were crawling up the sides! They hated the new bin too! I spent the next hour sitting on the bathroom floor lifting handfuls of worm bedding and letting them fall through my fingers, "aerating" the bedding to try to get rid of the sour smell and make the worms happier.

When I got up Monday morning, I opened the bin to find what looked like a pound of worms lining the walls of the bin and clumped under the edge; a mass escape attempt! In a fit of frustration, I scooped up all those worms, dumped them in a sack with a bit of bedding in it, hauled the sack out to the garden, and buried them. If they wanted to escape, go then! I figured what I had left would eventually breed a batch of worms adapted to the bin.

By the end of Tuesday, more worms were trying to escape, the worm bin still smelled sour, and I gave up. I began scooping them all out, finding pockets of dead pale worms along the bottom of the bin and throwing them in the garbage. I took about a quarter pound of living worms out to the garden and buried them, too. I piled up their peat moss, probably still containing a few worms, sprinkled some soil on it, and wished them all well. I left the empty worm bin open to the sun and air.

Late Tuesday night, feeling very depressed, I decided to go take a look at the garden before I went to bed, to remind myself that some things were going right. Arianna, the woman on the front desk that night, asked me as I wandered by dejectedly, "What's wrong?" I stopped and told her, "I killed my first batch of worms."

Arianna laughed. "Don't worry about it," she said. "I killed my first batch of worms. Everybody kills their first batch of worms!"

We talked about the lessons I'd learned.

What I did wrong:

• I didn't have the bin ready before I got the worms.
• I tried to keep them in way too small a space.
• I didn't give them a chance to settle in before I started feeding them.
• I blended the food into mush; breaking it into small bits creates more surface area and air pockets, making it easier for them to eat it.
• I fixed up way too much food in one batch. Worms do thrive on rotting garbage, but there seems to be a limit to how rotten. "A compost pile gone bad" has anaerobic bacteria, which they do not thrive on.
• I never gave them much of a chance to settle, at all. The poor things were hustled from one confusing environment to another for days, and stirred and shaken besides. They seem much happier in the garden, even though that is not the environment they were bred for either.
• I didn't react quickly enough when the bedding started going sour.
• Either not shredding the paper at the bottom of the bin, or the poster -- something down there was a worm-killer.
• The worms might have really been trying to escape. Worms will crawl up the sides of a bin for other reasons, though. It can be one stage of getting used to a new habitat.  Don't Panic.
  

I went to bed much more cheerful, resolved that I would try again -- after I had the apartment clean and had money for more worms!