This afternoon was all about worms.  Red Wigglers, to be exact.  2000 of them.

They came in a mesh bag from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. I don’t know what I expected 2000 worms to look like, but for sure I thought the package would be bigger.

I also thought there would be directions as to what to do with them. But there weren’t. So I called them.

First thing to do, Uncle Jim said, was give them some water. Just run water over the bag. Okay. That was easy enough to do in the kitchen sink.

Then they’d be ready to put wherever it was I wanted to put them.

My plan was to put them in my compost pile.  The phrase “compost pile” at our house is actually code for what is, in reality, a poop pile made up of alpaca poop, some mixed in hay from the barn, rabbit poop, and the horse bedding pellets I use in the bottom of the rabbit cages. To this we add our household wet garbage, but believe me, the pile is FAR more poop than wet compostable food waste. After all, there are 26 of them, and only 2 of us.

From prior composting experiences, I knew that the pile needed to be wet, so before I put the worms in, I had a few chores to do. First, I cleaned out the barn, “mucked the stalls” if you get my drift, then scooped up the piles in the pasture, dumping all of this in the compost pile. Ge’mar had cleaned out the bunny cages yesterday, so that stuff was already there. 

Next, I started spraying down the pile so it would be good and moist for the worms.  This sounds like it is a straightforward task, but trying to do anything with a water hose around here is not easy because it immediately attracts the attention of the alpacas who are quite sure that the reason you have a hose in your hand is to spray their bellies and legs. With some of them, they’ll stand still and let you give them an entire bath from head to toe — brush them off — pull things out of their tails– if I have the water hose in my hand I can touch them all I want to!

Today was no different. They almost all came for a good spray down, and then immediately walked 30 feet or so away and lay down in the dirt.

Great.

It was finally time for the worms.

I dumped my kitchen scraps onto the pile, and then scrattered the worms here and there over the top. Finally, I covered them up with the straw and pelleted bedding that was in the pile, gave it one more good spray (washing the dirt off the alpacas to the extent they would let me), and bid them adieu.

I think it will be fun to see what happens.  2000 worms didn’t seem like very many for the size space I have, but I’m hoping they’ll burrow down where it’s cool, munch on the stuff in the pile, reproduce, and leave behind worm castings, a most wonderful fertilizer.

When you can make something great from your wet garbage and animal poop, that is REAL recycling!

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