Several months ago I wrote about the worm bin that I keep in the garage beneath my apartment building. I was going to give them up; donate them to the school where I was working. A friend and former classmate in the Master Composter Class I took had a nice outdoor bin as well as city compost collection. For a while I walked the eight blocks to her place and dropped off our compost so that she could use it or put it in the collection bin.
What happened next was a combination of goading from my wife and resolve to be more self-reliant. After clearing out the storage unit and checking on the worms a few weeks back, I was only partially surprised to see them hanging on despite my negligence. To say they were thriving without food for the previous five months or so would be a bit of an overstatement. However, they were not all dead. There was a noticeable supply of crushed eggshells. I suppose the lesson there was that no matter how desperate the worms were, they could not eat and breakdown the dozens upon dozens of egg remains.
I did not add any more bedding (a mixture of newspaper and dry leaves) to the bin after checking on the worms. I did decide to go ahead and dump a couple of weeks of rotting organic waste in the bin along with the survivors. I don’t anticipate going down there every week, but I was glad to see they had persisted. These red wigglers have shown me that I need to do my part and make sure they have the proper nutrition. I guess this is as good as any pet I could hope for.
Considering I threw away the first bag (roughly 13 gallons, 50 Liters) of waste in nearly two weeks, I think I’ve managed to cut back on trash production while keeping the worms alive, for now.
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