I liked three babies yesterday. Not ‘liked’ as in I wanted them for myself, but ‘liked’ as in they didn’t get on my nerves, and when they were crying I made stupid faces to try to make them stop crying. I wanted them to be happy. I WANTED THEM TO BE HAPPY!!! It must have been an off-day for me.
My point being that between my pickling and not NOT-liking babies, maybe I’m more motherly than I thought. Definitely grandmotherly; I also wanted to bake cookies, but that’s a less rare phenomenon. Well, that’s what I thought – that I was more motherly – until I basically drowned my worms…so much for the mother in me. Best stay away from kids, I think…
This is sort of what the vermicompost worm box is supposed to look like at the start of a vermiculture undertaking, before all the paper has been broken down by those ravenous worms.
Except I’m bad at feeding the worms regularly, and in an effort to get away with feeding them less regularly I left my food scraps in larger chunks, so it would take more time for the worms to break them down. The problem with that was that I didn’t feel that the top layer ever became usable compost, and then I started purée-ing my food scraps to make them easier for the worms to break down. Then it got humid, and then the box got soggy, and I hadn’t added enough paper scraps to soak it all up, and you can’t add the paper and just mix it all up because then you get mites. But it turns out my food was a little too soggy and exposed anyway because that’s what I got – mites!
So I looked up how to get rid of the mites in my soggy worm compost, and took some watermelon rinds and placed them bitten-side down for a day. The mites jumped into the watermelon rinds and then I tossed the rinds in the garbage. Ok, mites sort of gone, but I still had soggy compost that wasn’t ready to be harvested. I couldn’t just soak up the sludge with paper because then the box wouldn’t dry out, so I decided to leave it in the sun for a few days to naturally dry out.
Turns out Montreal is humid and rainy this week. Which means no evaporating, just smelly compost. At least my worms were still alive last time I checked. I’m pretty sure they hate me. I’d hate me too if I couldn’t go near the surface of the compost box to get away from the water. They haven’t tried climbing out of the box, though (like a baby out of a crib), which is good…I think. I’m such a horrible mother…I think I need a worm dad.
Leave a Reply