Vermicomposting – Covering My Bets

Today I scooped a chunk of matter from underneath the shredded paper I’d layered last week. Here you can see a small margarine tub with worms, and the plastic spoon I use to tease them from the mass.

Here are my harvested worms. About half of them have egg-saddles, the rest have probably laid their eggs, so the remaining matrix holds eggs. In fact, I can see them.

The worms are squirming wildly. I’m harvesting them.

The matrix gets dumped in my new tower, which is meant to serve as a repository for scraps throughout the winter. If these worms burrow down and survive, so much the better. At least the eggs will survive and will hatch as soon as they are ready next spring.

And the harvested worms? I pop two into each indoor house plant.

One of my biggest problems, yours too, I bet, is a tendency to over water house plants. Two or three worms will find enough to eat in a pot of soil, and in doing so they will aerate and fertilize the houseplants during these indoor winter months.

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