The worms came crawling, one by one, hurrah

For the first time since we got our outdoor compost bins, we are adding green waste like fruit and vegetable peels to it all winter long. It has kept the family of squirrels living in the maple tree in our back yard very happy as they have everything from canteloupe rinds to avocado skins to munch on in the cold dead of winter.

But this is what the bins look like now:

We had decided just to shut down the bins for the rest of the winter and start composting again in the spring once everything thaws and we can take out the new compost from the bottom of the bins and spread it over our garden. But after three days of throwing out egg shells, used Kleenexes, apple cores and banana peels, we had to stop. The guilt was overwhelming – we couldn’t believe how many bags of garbage were leaving the house.

So we decided to bring in the big guns — a pound of worms. We picked them up from our local Eco-quartier office where a couple of hours after I called they had them waiting for us in a plastic yogurt container. The little wigglers cost us $15 and provided no end of  amusement for our kids, who were making up songs about their new pets on the trip to pick them up.

We had an indoor worm composting system years ago when we lived in an apartment, and still had the bin that the worms used to live in. We filled it up with shredded newspaper and moistened it with water:

Then, we unleashed the worms. You can watch the worms arrive in their new home here. Click on the picture below or here.

We’ve fed them once and it seems some of the worms are smarter than others. The smart ones are already eating the fresh worm food, the no-so-smart ones are still in the little pile of compost they came in. 

We’ve yet to see if the worms can handle all our green waste. We’re saving some of it to take to my parents’ place in the country this weekend. They have a big compost pile in their back yard, so we’ll dump a few plastic containers of green waste on theirs and let the worms do their magic on the rest here.