harvest in january

Yesterday it was time to reap some rewards from all the work my ambitious red wiggler friends have been doing for the last three months. It’s not a quick process. Mind-numbingly tedious, some might call it. There’s probably a better way. But I don’t mind at all.

A few weeks before harvest time, I cut back their food and entice them to one end of the bin with incentives; cornmeal in this case. Then, when it’s time, I sift through the other end, carefully checking for worms, and setting aside the precious castings made from nothing more than our kitchen scraps and shredded paper. My method looks like this:

worm dirt, bedding, worm bin

And I always make sure my wife is gone before delving in. What she don’t know won’t hurt her. It’s frankly a mess. But so worth it. I’m good at cleaning up in some circumstances.

I only use a couple of handfuls of vermicompost to make 5 gallons of tea, enough to spray my whole garden, with plenty left over for the flowers or planting holes or homemade potting mix. I stockpile castings through the winter in a 5 gallon bucket with the lid slightly ajar, to keep the microbes and geegaws that make it so good supplied with air so they can continue to do their thing.

And I’ll repeat what I said to myself earlier out loud. ‘Holy crap, there’s a lot of worms’. Might have to expand to two bins. Maybe even try an outside bin if my experiment shows any promise.

It’s the best thing in life to love what you do.