Worms: A Vermiculture Adventure

As an anniversary and Father’s Day present, Mr. Katie received the gift of worms and a worm farm factory (tower or stack of trays if you will).

The tower arrived in May for our anniversary.

I don’t know if I explicitly talked about getting worms with Mr. Katie, but the boys and I definitely decided that would be a great Father’s Day gift. In any case, I think Mr. Katie knew the worms would be coming for Father’s Day.

The worms arrived the Friday before Father’s Day. This was early!

They weren’t scheduled to come until the following Tuesday, which would give the boys and me a chance to tell Mr. Katie that they were coming and would give him time to put their habitat together. But isn’t that just the way things go sometimes?

The Amazon man brought them to our house on his truck. That’s right, the worms came on an Amazon truck.

They came in a regular-ish looking box with holes poked on the sides. Mr. Man knew just what it was when the Amazon man brought it to our porch. The holes were the big tip off.

Mr. Katie wasn’t home yet, so I opened the box and inside of the box was this bag.

I opened the bag and was surprised to find some very wiggly worms, ready to escape. It kind of freaked me out. They looked a little like tiny snakes.

Unfortunately, I was too wigged out to take any pictures of the bag full of wiggling worms.

But this is what it felt like. . . .

I felt a little like this upon seeing them.

The worm factory wasn’t assembled yet and the worms weren’t my gift. Still needed to act fast.

I didn’t want to take away any of the worm excitement from Mr. Katie. I wasn’t going to set up his worm factory for him but I needed a place to keep the worms since they didn’t seem to want to stay in the mesh bag.

I used the scant amount of knowledge that I had gleamed from my time teaching environmental education at Frost Valley YMCA. I wet some newspaper and put the worms in a dishwashing basin with the newspaper on top. Then I took the worms to the basement.

I didn’t text Mr. Katie to tell him that the worms had arrived.

The boys and I took to visiting the worms every half hour or so. Then we went to our local pool and forgot about them for a short time.

When Mr. Katie arrived home from work five hours after they arrived, I almost forgot to mention them at first. But then I remembered and blurted out that they had arrived.

Mr. Katie put their Worm Factory together. Since then, Mr. Katie has been learning about vermiculture (worm composting). We have been saving some of our food scraps. Mr. Katie has been pureeing some of our food waste into a slurry to feed to the worms. We also have been thinking all the things that we can do with the worms. We can fish with them. Also I am excited to use their worm castings, when we have some, to enrich my garden.

So that’s the worm adventure for now.

What are you up to?

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