The worms arrived today! The company told me last week that this was the day, but it was still exiting to open a padded envelope to find a sealed plastic bag with some soil, white root fragments and a few motionless red worms. Gently I turned the bag around to see if any of them was alive. They couldn't be all dead, could they? Suddenly one of them stretched out and pointed its head (?) to burrow from the light.
Ew!
The sight made me shudder, eventhough I regard myself as tough when it comes to yucky things. I put the bag aside and started drilling holes in the vermicompost to be. Forgotten were the earpains and the feebleness, at least untill the battery of the driller died. Sometimes I dearly wish for better tools than this cheap mailorder stuff.
In the meantime the roses started to bud on the balcony, and I paused ever so often to look at them. I've waited for these flowers for over a year. The vermicompost has been planed for less than a year, it's only fair that they shared my attention. Then I moisturised the vermicompost bedding and the time had come for breaking the bag.
Inside the lump of soil I found wriggling worm spagetthi. And again I shuddered, but why give in to basic reactions like these? (They serve a purpose, I'm sure.) I broke the lump and scattered it over the bedding to leave the worms to fend for themselves. It's a way to find dead worms. Those who haven't burrowed after an hour are dead.
What I though were white root fragments proved to be worm babies wiggling their tails, or shaking their heads perhaps, against the light. Compost worms don't like light. After an hour I could see that all worms were live and well, since the only thing left on surface was the tip of a tail. I treated my new multipet to a generous prune core and put the vermicompost beneath our stairs. My next project is to build a trap for fruitflies...
(I haven't added a CafePresslink today because of technical trouble. I'll return to the routine shortly, with the addition of highdefinition CClicensed picture downloads.)
2 comments:
I just ordered a pound of worms too! I am kind of nervous to get them in the mail.
Those little things are quite sturdy, but before I got them I thought that half of them would've suffocated in the bag when I opened it.
A pound of worms! Your provider is generous - what I got was less than half a pound. I should order overseas next time, I think :)
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