LET WORMS EAT YOUR GARBAGE

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TLC FOR RED WORMS

Basically, worm care consists of providing the wigglers with the proper environment, checking them occasionally, and-other than that-leaving them alone! Daily care is unnecessary: The less you disturb your industrious helpers, the better off they are.

About six weeks after you start the bin, you'll notice changes in the bedding. It will get darker, and you'll be able to identify individual castings (worm manure). What's more, despite the regular addition of food waste, the volume of matter in the bin will slowly diminish. As the proportion of castings thus increases, the quality of the environment for the worms decreases. After a few months, you'll have to remove the worms and the usable compost, and prepare a batch of fresh bedding.

SORTING THINGS OUT

Every four months or so, then, plan to spend a couple of hours sorting worms. It's easy to do . . . and even fun when your family or friends help. Begin by gathering a 6-footsquare sheet of heavy plastic, a light source (such as a lamp with a I00-watt bulb), a plastic dishpan for the worms, a garbage can or heavy duty plastic bag to hold the vermicompost, and some fresh bedding. Spread the plastic sheet on the floor or on a large table, and overturn the entire contents of the worm bin onto it. Make about nine cone-shaped piles out of this material. You should see worms all over the place, but if the light is bright enough, they'll quickly move away from it toward the center of each mound.

Now, go read a book or do something else for five or ten minutes. When you return, you won't see any worms. Gently remove the sur face of each pile. As you do so, the newly exposed worms will again retreat into the mound. By following this procedure one heap at a time, you'll find that when you come back to the first pile, its worms will have disappeared again, and you can remove a second layer from each heap.

Eventually, the creatures will congregate in a mass at the bottom of each pile. Put them in the dishpan, clean off any castings or compost, and weigh the worms. If you haven't let the box go undivided for too long, you should have at least as many as you started out with . . . perhaps more! (If you change the bedding every two to three months instead of every four months, you'll harvest even more worms. As their environment decreases in quality, the worms gradually die off and are composted themselves.) After weighing them, put the worms in fresh bedding and let them "do their thing", as before. Meanwhile, you can deal with the buckets of rich, lovely vermicompost you scooped out in the sorting process.

Your compost will vary in consistency, depending on how long the bin has been in operation, how much and what kind of garbage was buried, and how much decomposition has occurred. Some of the most recently buried food waste can go right back into the fresh bedding. The rest of the vermicompost can be stored in a plastic bag, garbage can, or corrugated carton . . . where it will continue to break down. As it dries it can be used on your garden or houseplants.

During the sorting procedure, you're likely to encounter many earth-living creatures you hadn't noticed before, including springtails, white "pot worms" or enchytraeids, sow bugs, mites, and even a centipede or two. Except for the centipedes, which may attack worms, most of these organisms help in the process of converting your garbage to compost, so consider them friends.

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