Friday, May 16, 2008

Composting Worms

We are farmers. Our crops consist of two gardens chock full of veggie plants hopefully producing enough to put away for winter. Our live stock is a rubbermaid tub of red composting worms.

My dad and I have researched them for years. We finally decided to take the plunge and purchase 1 pound of worms to split between the two of us. I justified this to DH, who wasn't as excited about worms as I was, that this would make a GREAT science project. Yes, I love living and learning!

Now these critters are quite interesting. They live in damp newspaper shreds and eat our vegetable scraps. We feed them a couple handfuls once a week, mist their newspaper if needed and change it out every couple of months. Their "home" sits in my laundryroom on a table with screens over them. The screen serves two purposes. Number 1 is to keep any fruit flies from flying through the house. The second is so the cats don't climb in and sit on our livestock.

The kids and I changed the bedding last week and had the most wonderfully, rich compost. Of course they couldn't help be remind me that it is actually worm poop. But being as I am a worm farmer, poop is my life. :)

We first had to rip newspaper into strips.
We took this as an opportunity to catch up on the local news as we took turns reading stories outloud to each other.

We then took the worms outside and dumped the tub on a tarp. We had to sift through the castings to find the worms. The castings went into 1 bucket and the worms went back into their rubbermaid home full of new paper.We were happy to see our worms reproduced! ©2008 The Homefront Lines

2 comments:

Lisa~ said...

I like this idea! It doesnt seem to hard... I always think of composting as such a chore....

Thanks!

Lisa

PS. Thanks for leaving your link on my post at lapbook lessons.... *Ü*

Unknown said...

My father in law has worms for the birds in a box in his garage. My kids always fight over who gets to feed the birds when we go for a visit. ;)