Adventures in Vermiculture or My Pet Worms

We’ve had a few struggles managing our worm bin including the unfortunate drought and exodus of 2016 and the great flood of 2017. I had first seen worms for sale at a market several yeas ago and when Josh and I moved in together, I floated the idea. He agreed without hesitation which I took as clear evidence that we were meant to be. I ordered a bin and a half pound of worms from Green Calgary and Josh picked them up one evening after work. As is the case with all of the animals we have acquired so far, I was very nervous of and for them… I wasn’t keen on touching them and I was very worried we would kill them, which we did, eventually, unfortunately…

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We kept the bin in the kitchen and would regularly wake up to find worms on the floor, under the fridge and stove, and in the bathroom. We couldn’t seem to get the environment right for them. We also had a poorly designed worm bin which we have never replaced because I think it’s worth knowing if they are unhappy rather than just forcing them to remain in an uninhabitable ecosystem.

First, we tried to ration their feeding, but that didn’t seem to help. Then we tried misting the bin so it would be moist enough, but we still had escapees on the regular. At the end of December, we were leaving on our honeymoon and had very few survivors. Josh thought it was too wet at that point so we added some potting soil (dumb: it’s full of Styrofoam pellets), and paper and put the whole thing in the bathtub so that we would at least know where any of them went. When we got back a week later they were all dead.

I had given up, but Josh said we should try again so we got another half pound of worms and tried to stay out of their way. We fed them as we had scraps available and used brown paper and egg cartons as bedding. While they did continue to leave the bin regularly, the overall quality of the material being produced was much improved.

We even moved them across Canada, and while they definitely should have been uncomfortable in the backseat of a truck travelling from Alberta to Ontario, we couldn’t find any evidence that they left the bin while en route.

We kept them in my aunt’s bedroom with us for three months until our possession date without issue and haven’t seen any escapees since we moved them into this house. We feed them all of our vegetable scraps, but did make the mistake of giving them a quarter cabbage… Now the bin is full of water. Unfortunately, the bin wasn’t equipped with a tap and now we’re just working on drying it out by limiting our feeding again and adding a lot of bedding.

It’s not as easy as I had thought it would be to keep worms, and they can’t consume enough to compost all of the food we consume so we are looking at alternatives. We can freeze some of it until we have time to make vegetable broth, and some of it can be fed to the chickens. We’re also planning to build a keyhole garden which has a built-in compost repository in the center, and in the long-term we are hoping to get some goats or pigs.

But it’s been a good start to composting and a great initiative to undertake in an apartment or city setting for diverting organic materials from the landfill.

#worms #vermiculture #homesteading #indoorcomposting