Worms in our Bed

We put worms in our garden bed to help fertilize the soil through vermicomposting.  I ordered Uncle Jim's 1,000-Count Red Wiggler Live Composting Worms from Amazon.com.  While tracking my future buddies through the UPS system, I got a message that they were diverted to Florida due to a UPS sorting error and would spend an extra weekend there.  I called UPS, explained that there were live passengers aboard the box, and requested that the package be routed overnight to me.  It got here with most passengers safely intact, except for a few that escaped the cloth bag into the cardboard box.  It looks likely to me that a few wigglers made it onto the UPS conveyor belts and possibly took a ride with other packages to other destinations.

I loosened a small area of soil and dumped the bag of worms (in peat moss) on the garden.  Some of the worms quickly left the pile and squirmed across the top of the garden.  A few tried to make a break from the garden, but once they got half-way across the lumber border, they turned back to the soil.

The worms dispersed themselves from the peat pile within a couple days.  To feed the worms, I found the idea for a worm tower on the web.  A worm tower is a place to put mulch material from the kitchen into the garden and a place for worms to feed.  My worm tower is a 4-inch PVC pipe that is buried about halfway into the soil.  I drilled 1/2-inch holes into the portion of the pipe that gets buried into the soil.  As the theory goes, the worms enter the holes, eat some tasty mulch from our kitchen, exit through the holes, and leave castings and nutrients for our vegetables to absorb.  It's a cycle from our kitchen, to our garden, and back to our kitchen, whereby worms help turn banana peels into tomatoes for our salad.

The worm tower has a drain cap loosely inserted into the top of the PVC pipe.  I've been grinding up vegetable scraps from the kitchen in the food processor and dropping the resulting mulch slurry into the tower.  I grind the mulch so that it decomposes more quickly.  My recent Googling tells me that worms eat the bacteria that grows on the food waste.  Worms apparently love melon and cantaloupe rinds; like fruits, vegetables, crushed egg shells, and banana peels; and only tolerate citrus, onions, and garlic.  Yum, can't wait for tomatoes.