The Worms Ate My Garbage!

I am about ready to harvest my first batch of worm poo, or "castings" as the vermicomposting community so delicately calls it. Tonight I spent some time digging through the bin--the pile is greatly reduced both in volume and weight--and picked out the few easily identifiable items they have been avoiding for the past few weeks. They don't seem interested in the really hard part of anything: the woody bottom of Brussels sprouts, the rindy part of the banana that you hold onto when you peel it, chunks of red cabbage. Tea bags, which was a surprise, but these were completely intact.  Citrus rinds, which I knew better than to include but did anyway. They molded immediately and I took them out. The leaves attached to a tangerine. Coffee filters, though I probably didn't tear them up into small enough pieces. Perhaps if I just didn't feed them anything else, they would eventually eat these things but I have a backlog of delicious compost waiting for them so we're all going to move on with our lives.

The colony has grown like gangbusters. Not like horror movie amounts of worms, but very noticeably more than when I started. Visible evidence of bebe worms, too--tiny skinny pale things. I've pushed everything over to one side of the box. Within the next few days, I will put a pile of food on the opposite side. In theory, they should slowly migrate over to the food side, so I can scoop out the castings and gift them to my friends the Urban Farmers to make gardening magic.