incremental progress, with notes on worm wrangling

Never dull here, but I wish I had more stamina sometimes. Yesterday I pounded in some of the salvaged metal fenceposts in the place where the new henyard will be. This task must be done while the ground is still soft from the winter rains, and I really couldn't put it off much longer. After just three fence posts my wrists were very unhappy, but that was all that is absolutely necessary, the henhouse will form the corner of the new run. I must continue making progress; the girls will be much happier with some shade this summer, but today my shoulders and wrists were pretty unhappy. Incremental progress is still progress...

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Fortunately one of the tasks yesterday was a bit messy and time consuming, but needs not very much in the way of upper body strength... worm wrangling requires only time, gloves, and a tarp. My little invertebrate pets have been working hard for months, and had turned almost the entire contents of their wormhome into fertilizer... time to separate the worms from the castings, and start the cycle again.

Since I will be doing a presentation on in-kitchen worm composting next month, I want to have the bin looking its best: actively in process, with fresh bedding, and worms eating food. I was given the worlds most wimpy paper shredder a few weeks ago, and it was mostly able to shred up some of the newspaper, as long as I cut each page into thirds, and fed them in one single piece at a time. Still, it makes much fluffier worm bedding than tearing the paper by hand.

But I'm getting ahead...what I did was to separate the worms, which means dumping the whole bin out on a tarp, (first removing any uneaten food and setting it aside to be put back in with the new fluffy damp bedding) and then gently forming the resultant damp soggy mess into a number of smaller heaps. The worms move away from the light and drier air, so after a while you can scoop some of the black castings from the top and away from the edges of each heap. This gets repeated over and over again until there are much smaller heaps that are mostly worms, which then get dumped back into the wormhome to start eating my scraps again.

After six months I harvested about ten pounds of very damp worm castings, larger families could generate much more, and worm castings are great garden food. And just for the record, not only are the worms completely silent, but the wormhome doesn't smell, and neither does their ummm... byproduct. If I don't tell people, no one knows I have a box of worms living in my kitchen. Originally I had them living outside my back door, but the first summer that the temperature went over 100F they all died, so now I keep them in the house.

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I've been making trinkets for our sale this weekend. Some felt flower pins, and started on a few kittyface needle-books. Hoping to complete a few soft fabric patchwork scarves, and new acorn and oakleaf earrings, and maybe scissors cases from the springtime colored leather scraps I found.