Thursday, August 18, 2011

My worms

Winter is coming to an end down here in my corner of the world, I think. It's almost like someone playing with a light switch: on/off on/off on/off~ hot/cold hot/cold hot/cold. One day can be in the high 80s and sunny and the next cold enough for me to not want to leave my bed. Very curious the weather in this country. Today it reeallly wanted to rain, clouds all dark and ominous, wind slamming my doors and windows like a haunted house, me running back and forth taking inside my just washed laundry...and then nothing. But enough about the weather...

 Lets take a look at my garden, specifically my worm compost. I started it about four months ago or maybe five and harvested my first batch last week! It could have been done sooner but i did keep adding rabbit poo and old veggies. This is just in time as I am wanting to get in some more veggies before I have to leave in three and a half months *gasp*. I've just planted all sorts of different cucumbers just because they are delicious and grow very well here. Anyway, in order to harvest the compost I had to get the worms out so they could go to work on the next batch. There are a bunch of ways to do this but I decided to do some worm wrangling. Baisically, I put a bit of compost on  a tarp in the sun and put some new compost on the tarp in a shady part. Theoretically the worms should run from the sun part to the shade because they don't want to develop wrinkles or melanoma and should then dive into the new stuff. What really happened was, after I spread out the compost to expose them to the sun they would just squirm around till they found another worm and try to hide under him/her (I'm pretty sure they're all hermaphrodites) till there was a worm ball. Or they would hide under some smaller bits of compost. So really it turned into me picking worms out one by one and putting them into the new stuff. After a couple hours this was no longer fun so i decided on another method of putting a roof tile in the suitcase, putting new stuff on one side and the old stuff on the other and hoping they would all wiggle their way under the tile to the new stuff!! fingers crossed. I'd also like to add that I started with about 14 worms and at the moment there's got to be around 1,000. When they're happy, they're happy.


Garden as of 2 weeks ago

Lil pepper so cute

Worm wranglin! Git to the shade!
  
Gave up wrangling and trying the crossing over method. New stuff on right, composted stuff on left.



Ok. Since those 4 pictures took about 45 mins to upload that is all I can handle for tonight but I will update very soon about other aspects of my life. It's not all about worms ya know!