There are WORMS in my house!

...and I *love* them!

A few weeks ago, I finally convinced DH to let me have a worm bin for vermicomposting. Since we are eating so many more vegetables and fruits now, we have a lot of food scraps that we were just throwing away. How wasteful!

I had to work for months dropping hints about the worm bin before I got DH to agree to it. And even when we were making the bin, he wasn't too thrilled about it. But he did it, and now we are almost ready to harvest our bin for the first time!

I am so excited about how easy it is, and my 2 year old DS absolutely LOVES helping me feed the worms every day. He helps me to scoop away some of the bedding to create a hole (we use a spoon to do this...hey, I said I love the worms, not that I love *touching* them!), then he puts in a few handfuls of food scraps. When we get ready to close the bin back up, he always says "Bye-bye, worms!" I love it! Our first little science project.

So, you want to know more details?

Here are the directions we followed to create the worm bin. I actually had two totes in the garage identical to the ones in the photos leftover from my teacher days that had been used to store books in my classroom library. I read the instructions to DH and he drilled the necessary holes, and we assembled the totes into the proper configuration. We also worked together to cut and soak the newspaper. For grit, we stole some dirt out of a plant that had some to spare. So, the cost of my worm bin was $0! Even if you buy the totes though, it shouldn't cost more than $10-$12 I'd think. You can buy fancy commercially made worm bins that look nicer if you want for around ~$100-$150, but FREE works for me!

The worms on the other hand cost me $20 for a pound. I found the red wrigglers on Craigslist and apparently that's about the going rate for a pound of composting worms. From what I've read, a pound is roughly 500 worms. A worm can eat about 1/2 it's weight each day, so a pound of worms should be able to eat about 1/2 a pound of food a day! And the worms will reproduce, so eventually I should have enough worms that I can share -- I hope to convince my mom to let me start a worm bin for her!

Overall, this is a super easy venture. And after just a few weeks, my bin is almost ready to be harvested! The vermicompost will be a great addition to my garden and my yard plants.

The only problem is we still have way more food scraps than my worms can eat, so I am now working on convincing DH to let me have a compost tumbler. I'm not quite there yet though! I also want to build a square foot garden, but since we just moved here in November, it hasn't happened yet. There is still a lot of "moving in" to be done before we get around to starting new projects, so it may be next year before the garden becomes a reality.