Our New Pets!

We have pet worms! Nathan and Bea like to check on them, spray water in their tub when it looks dry and dump in some fruit and veggie scraps about once a week. Nathan also decorated their bin with stickers and informed me that they like it when he stirs them up. Worms are pretty easy pets to have and this project should result in great home-made fertilizer for the garden. I really like this concept since it reduces our landfill contribution and gives us cheep, organic and safe fertilizer. This is actually my 3rd attempt and I hope I have learned something from my first so-so result and my second frozen worm tragedy. This time I also know a few things not to do:

• Don't let them get too wet or dry. Too wet will get stinky and too dry will dehydrate and kill the worms. You can monitor this by spraying water or adding more bedding (newspaper or egg carton shreds)
  
• Don't put in more food scraps than they can eat. While I was once told that red wigglers will multiply to handle the quantity you add... I found this not to be entirely true. Maybe it was because we added a ton of scraps brought in from the kitchens of all 28 of my students... hummm, probably needed more space to handle that. I got flies and smelly compost from having more food than my worms could eat. Now I add only a cookie jar-full a week and put the rest in the regular compost. I like to see the food getting chewed up by worms and bacteria before I add more.
• Don't leave the worms out in freezing weather. They will freeze and die! I went to my garage one winter to check on my worms and found a frozen block of compost and worms. It was sad. Now I know that worms like warm tropical weather. So when winter rolls around I may have to bring them into the basement if I want to keep it going.