Attack of the worms!

My wife and I are big-time recyclers and proud of it. If it can be recycled, we recycle it. And if it can’t be recycled, we oftentimes find a way to repurpose it, especially clothes where repurposing is called refashioning. My wife will take an old sweatshirt from 1985, cut the neckline, make it smaller, crimp the front, shorten the sleeves, and suddenly it looks hot off this season’s rack.

In our recycling efforts, my wife is the leader. And the recycling bone of contention for her has always been feeding our garbage can and disposer waste product that would otherwise feed a lush, rich, bacteria-producing compost. For years my wife talked about composting (obsessed over it, really), and for all those years, this was the one area I was less than enthusiastic to include into our recycling practices. I always thought composting belonged in 1885 or on a farm. In my head I saw a reeking, steaming pile of garbage being turned over with a pitchfork and wanted none of it. My wife argued that if you did it right, it wouldn’t smell. And my thought was always, “We’ll see.” Or, really, “We’ll see what the neighbors think.”

After nearly a year living in our new home (living in a condo for 11 years left us little – actually, no – opportunity for composting), I relented my fight against composting and my wife forged ahead, reading up, planning, deciding the best way to start, which led us to standing in the bin aisle at Walmart one night, looking for a couple 33-gallon plastic bins, one to drill about a thousand holes into and another to catch “drippings.” Perfect.

“It’s called compost tea,” my wife said. “Plants, flowers, the yard loves it.”

We bought the bins, a bag of topsoil and manure for starter, and headed home (my wife eager, me less than eager).

On the way, my wife said, “And don’t worry about the smell. We’ll set it up in our garage.”

Great, I thought.

When we got home, my wife unveiled her plans for the compost while a bowl of kitchen scraps sat wasting next to the sink. She instructed me to take one of the bins into the garage and drill the hand-cramping holes (“In precisely these locations”) while she made other preparations.

It was raining outside, and as I was grabbing the bin, I saw my wife gearing up to out there. She threw on her raincoat, grabbed a flashlight, and snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up a small white bucket.

“What are you doing?” I asked, knowing I would not like her answer.

“It’s raining. How lucky. I’m collecting worms.”

Worms!

“No worms. No way,” I said.

Apparently you can make a few different kinds of composts, one of which is a worm compost in which you dump a bucket of worms in with your garbage and they’ll make short order of breaking down your waste product. We discussed this briefly in the past, and part of the compromise was that we wouldn’t start a worm compost. A compost was bad enough, but I didn’t want a boiling mass of worms rolling around inside the garbage we were already harboring.

“I didn’t plan on it, but I read online one guy actually fed his compost a shirt as an experiment, and the worms ate it in a about two weeks! Worms will make it go quicker.”

My wife, the mad scientist.

“Fine,” I relented. “But if there’s one issue, I mean ONE small issue, it’s going.”

I was going to add “in the trash,” but I realized I was talking about trash already.

“And don’t worry,” my wife said. “They say the worms will stay in the bin. They won’t leave their food source.”

They better not.

And so the rest of the night went. While I prepared the compost bins, my wife went outside and collected about 300 worms. An hour later, she came into the garage, soaking wet, carrying her living cesspool. “We’re ready.”

I wasn’t. But I had to admit, even to myself, I was a little curious.

We set up the compost bins in the corner of the garage, the ventilated one propped on old planting pots inside the non-ventilated one, threw in the topsoil, manure, and kitchen scraps. And then the worms.

“Now be careful mixing it up,” my wife said. “You don’t want to kill the worms.”

“Did you name them, too?” And it was thrilling how I got tasked with “mixing it up.”

Gingerly, I shoveled the mess into what I thought looked “mixed” (you really couldn’t tell), trying with painstaking difficulty to not cut a worm in half, half-talking to them: “Sylvester, you go there. Herman, join your brother on the other side. Leroy, stop inching up the plastic.” And so on. My wife seemed happy.

We went inside to clean up or disinfect.

An hour later my wife wanted to check on the compost, so I accompanied her into the garage, as if maybe the worms had already broken down the trash and were crying for my old CCR concert t-shirt.

What happened next is exactly like walking into your kitchen when pasta sauce explodes out the pot and at first you only see one drop on the counter before you notice what looks like the wood chipper scene in Fargo happened in your kitchen.

We turned on the lights in the garage, and I immediately noticed a worm hanging off the top edge of the plastic bins. It dangled and dropped to floor with an audible splat. And then we noticed he wasn’t the first to make this leap of fate.

Worms were everywhere: scattered on the floor, crawling up the walls, sliding down the side of the bins, stuck (yes, stuck) to the throw rug at the base of the stairs.

“How are they getting out?” my wife cried.

“I don’t know, maybe through the thousand holes I had to drill.”

“But they’re not supposed to leave.”

“They’re worms.”

I told my wife if we had one issue. Now we had about 300.

I quickly grabbed a putty knife and began shoveling up the worms and throwing them back inside the compost bin, but they kept coming like a mass exodus, like an escape in progress. In waves! Almost like lemmings.

When I finally got them all, I hauled the whole contraption, which was what I started to look at it as, outside into one of our flower beds. I removed the ventilated bin form the non, tapped out the non, and placed the ventilated one on the ground.

“By morning you better be gone,” I told the worms. “Or else.”

When I got back inside, my wife agreed we wouldn’t worm compost anymore. You bet we won’t.

Worm compost abandoned, we started over with a clean, fresh, and simple bacteria-only compost that is, as my wife says, “losing its mass” every day.
It’s currently sitting outside our front door (why, don’t ask me) like we have a crated animal out there, making our neighbors and mail carrier wonder.
And if it ever starts to smell (but how would really know, seeing we live across the way from a water treatment plant) we feed it old copies of the Sun Day, proving news really is good for the planet!

---