worm farm

I am frustrated by how much time I am spending on the computer. This is not helped by the fact that it is so sloooooooow. We have just about filled up its memory completely ... poor thing.

I am trying to wean myself off the facebook farmtown game. I like how you can interact with others and negotiate and build wealth and buy things. I like how you can garden without getting hot or bitten by mossies ... and how everything always grows without fail ... including your bank balance.

Meanwhile my house is still untidy and there are mounds of washing to put away and iron. There are dishes to wash and dry .... a job much more difficult without a dishwasher.

I was sick yesterday .... I think i got KT's tummy bug ... although it hit me a week later than it hit her. I spent the whole day either sleeping or running to the toilet. J drove me down to the school to watch KT compete in the cross country and then I went back home to bed ... and the toilet. Lucky I have a large stockpile of toilet paper!!

I still feel tired and slow today but at least my appetite has returned and I can actually stand up for longer than a few minutes.

I have been meaning to put the legs of my worm farm into tubs of water/oil or vinegar to prevent ants from climbing up them and into the farm. I decided to wait until the bottom tray of the worm farm was ready to be emptied so that I could combine the two jobs and do them while Justin was available to help with the lifting (each layer gets pretty heavy).

I was going to wait until mid April but right out of the blue the ants have invaded ... after pretty much leaving the worms alone for the last 3 months. Arthur had to put the legs into tubs almost immediately.

When J got ready to empty the tray of worm castings into a foam box (which I will turn into a raised herb garden) he discovered that there were still heaps of worms in amongst the castings even though they are theoretically meant to move up into the higher trays where there is more food.

I didn't want to put the worms into the foam box partly because I didn't want to lose any food scrap eating power and partly because I thought the worms would get too hot out in the front garden and without any way of escaping they might die.

So I went back to my can of worms instruction book to see what they had to say about the situation.

We had done the right thing by putting the tray on top of the others, leaving it uncovered to expose the worms to sunlight and make them want to burrow downwards ... but unfortunately they weren't going down far enough to get to the next tray.

The next part of the instructions said to sift through the worm castings by hand ... separating out the worms ... hmmmpfff I must have skimmed over that part of the instructions previously.

So then I spent the next hour or perhaps hour and a half sorting the worms from the castings, wearing my gardening gloves. I'm pretty sure I got most of them. They are fairly easy to spot and the castings crumble away around them.

Note to self ...perhaps next time (when my worm population is bigger) I will empty the castings directly into the garden and put mulch over them ... so it doesn't matter if a few worms end up in there.

I think next time I will be prepared too and will know what to expect ... and I have this handy set of notes to refer back to!