Worms and More....

My worm bin is still working. I've had a little trouble with fruit flies, which frankly, drive me insane. Small stupid bugs that swarm up from the bin every time I opened it and took up residents in my kitchen! I did a little Internet sleuthing and found out how to minimize the occurrence of fruit flies in the bin. So I did it and it's been better...still there...but better.

It's hard to imagine that under this:

Is this:Rich beautiful humus!

Here's a few pictures of my yard. Above is a sweat pea vine that pretty much takes over one side of my fence each year. Luckily it's pretty. Below is my container garden. I have several heirloom tomato varieties, a few that I started from seed and a couple I got from a friend. I also have carrots, dill,eggplant and peppers. Hopefully they keep growing.

The last picture is the front of my house. The blair witch project did what I hoped it would, which is be taken over by the morning glories. It's pretty cool if not incredibly messy. But hey that's my life.

Vermicompost

We've got worms! To make compost that is. In our basement even. I split an order with a group of women and ended up with 500 redworms. They are small and wiggly and kind of gross but their 'castings' make for great compost and it's a fun project for the kids....well Jasper really, I think Sylvia could care less!
Taking care of worms is harder than you might think. They need a dark moist environment with organic material to eat and gritty material to help them digest.
We have ours in a see through bin which is cool when you want to gawk at them, but isn't a very dark. To fix this I've put a tarp around the bin to make them feel at home. I put newspapers, some cardboard, coffee grounds, a glass of water, and kitchen veggie/fruit scraps in with the worms. It's pretty stinky when you remove the lid, especially with the large amount of garlic.
I'm thinking I need a big compost outside too because we go through a lot of kitchen scraps. I hate throwing any of them away, but I don't think I should give them all to the worms.
I guess that will be another project!