Sunday, July 12, 2009

We have worms and yes, we're happy about this

Aside from attending Green Day, this week has been a quiet one around the Milne household. I was worried I would have to dredge up some whimsical blog ideas (such as my life's ambitions--I'd thought up three) just to post something. Instead I'm going to briefly blog about our newest addition to our apartment: worms.

That's right, you read it correctly, worms.

I received a call on Friday from the Earth's General Store to inform me that our vermicomposter had arrived. We picked it up on Saturday. Once home, we filled our bin (a large Rubbermaid, I'm not sure what the capacity is, but it's probably 1m x 0.5m x 0.75m) with soil and worms, and installed it into our storage closet that afternoon. So now we have worms in our apartment, munching on our produce scraps. We've already set aside a couple of litres of scraps to feed them throughout the week. I'm hopeful that the worms will help us cut down on the amount of garbage we produce. We expect to have fresh, nutrient rich soil in 4 to 6 months. We'll use it in our balcony garden next year.



A note on our balcony garden: It's going...so-so. Our peas shot up very quickly, but many of the plants were baked in the sun. We've been eating the occasional pea off the vines that have survived, but we don't feel it's worth it to plant them next year. I had to re-start the carrots about 3 weeks ago. We think we started the first batch too early and weren't getting enough sunlight hours to thrive. Hopefully the new plants will fair better. Our tomato plants are full and healthy, but I've yet to see any tomatoes sprout. I think this may be due to the cool temperatures we've been having this year. Our strawberries are much they same. We've got several large plants, but no berries. I think its unlikely that any will be produced either. We'll try again next year.

Ciao,

Andrea

5 comments:

Lisa said...

Worms! Awesome! A composter is one of the first things I plan on getting if I ever move out. You'll have to keep me up to date about how it's going. I bet Tabitha loves them, ha ha.

Unknown said...

We hope we can keep them going--we might be able to give you some worms if we do really well. And there's a lid on the box, so hopefully Tabitha won't try to go poking around in the dirt...although she could easily fit her paw through one of the air holes.

Cape-Freak said...

Are your worms... arrogant?

Unknown said...

They haven't shown to be...yet. But then, how can you really tell with a worm?

Cape-Freak said...

Well, if they start singing, that might be a good clue.