Eeewww, I mean... cool!
Wow. It feels like someone finally found the spring switch and turned it on this weekend. We were fortunate to get two days of sun and warm weather. I expect to see a few burnt faces tomorrow at work... people never learn.
I got myself a set of wheels yesterday (a Nissan Versa, cute little car, not much juice but at least it was barely sipping away at the gas) to visit my former boss (former from a long time ago) Lindsay. Obviously, having a car means running all the heavy-duty errands, like grocery shopping (cans) and picking up two worm composting bins from a friend in Kits.
I kinda scored on the composting. I few months back, I wrote about having to wait until April to take a course with the Vancouver Composting centre to get a bin, which meant no compost until the end of the summer. My friend's bins were already started, so I was hoping for a harvest within the next few weeks. I placed the bins downstairs in the garage, where it's dark and the temperature will stay fairly constant.
I didn't play much with the bins yesterday, as I was getting ready for dinner. It was a really nice drive to Anmore and an even nicer dinner with Lindsay, Geoff and Lucas (and Raven and Rosie, the dogs). I always love coming back to their house, this is where I stayed when I first moved to BC in 2002. They hosted me for a few weeks while my apartment was getting set up, offered a car to pick up miscellaneous items at IKEA, and invited me over at Christmas so I wouldn't be by myself. Fond memories indeed.
Today, I was on a mission: poke through the bins to see how much compost was ready to harvest. I can't bring the bins up to my balcony, they're too heavy to carry around. If it was harvest time, I intended to transfer most of the content to a bucket and then bring the bucket to the balcony, leaving it outside. The worms would crawl to the bottom, I could harvest the top soil in layers, until all was left was a bunch of worms ready to go back to a new bedding. It was a great plan.
Except that it didn't really work that way. I pulled the cover away from the first bin, mostly in the dark, and could hear the rustling of little critters. I used a flashlight to get a better idea of what was crawling around and boy, I wish I hadn't. The worms are fine, no problem, but the bugs? I read some literature online about worm composting and it's normal for other critters to set shop in there, but that many? Most were pill bugs, little grey bugs with a hard shell. I read that they chew through the hard stuff, very useful, but creepy.
It smelled a bit ripe in the bin, so I started poking around with a plastic garden fork to move the content around and discovered that a lot of food hadn't been eaten yet. Worms don't eat food immediately after you leave it in there, it takes a few days before the scraps get really gross and worm enticing. I guess my friend had a bag of apples that went bad, 'cause I saw several almost full apples in the bin. It really looked like there was enough food in there for another week. But the soil was really wet (the bins were left outside and we've had pretty rainy weather), and there was no bedding left, so I shredded a few sheets of newspaper and mixed it in, along with egg shells (to rebalance the acidity). I left the other bin untouched, the worms had enough food.
So, it will be another week (at least) until I can start keeping kitchen scraps in a container on the counter instead of throwing them in the trash. The bins are full of compost, but there was too much uneaten food to harvest. At least that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
I got myself a set of wheels yesterday (a Nissan Versa, cute little car, not much juice but at least it was barely sipping away at the gas) to visit my former boss (former from a long time ago) Lindsay. Obviously, having a car means running all the heavy-duty errands, like grocery shopping (cans) and picking up two worm composting bins from a friend in Kits.
I kinda scored on the composting. I few months back, I wrote about having to wait until April to take a course with the Vancouver Composting centre to get a bin, which meant no compost until the end of the summer. My friend's bins were already started, so I was hoping for a harvest within the next few weeks. I placed the bins downstairs in the garage, where it's dark and the temperature will stay fairly constant.
I didn't play much with the bins yesterday, as I was getting ready for dinner. It was a really nice drive to Anmore and an even nicer dinner with Lindsay, Geoff and Lucas (and Raven and Rosie, the dogs). I always love coming back to their house, this is where I stayed when I first moved to BC in 2002. They hosted me for a few weeks while my apartment was getting set up, offered a car to pick up miscellaneous items at IKEA, and invited me over at Christmas so I wouldn't be by myself. Fond memories indeed.
Today, I was on a mission: poke through the bins to see how much compost was ready to harvest. I can't bring the bins up to my balcony, they're too heavy to carry around. If it was harvest time, I intended to transfer most of the content to a bucket and then bring the bucket to the balcony, leaving it outside. The worms would crawl to the bottom, I could harvest the top soil in layers, until all was left was a bunch of worms ready to go back to a new bedding. It was a great plan.
Except that it didn't really work that way. I pulled the cover away from the first bin, mostly in the dark, and could hear the rustling of little critters. I used a flashlight to get a better idea of what was crawling around and boy, I wish I hadn't. The worms are fine, no problem, but the bugs? I read some literature online about worm composting and it's normal for other critters to set shop in there, but that many? Most were pill bugs, little grey bugs with a hard shell. I read that they chew through the hard stuff, very useful, but creepy.
It smelled a bit ripe in the bin, so I started poking around with a plastic garden fork to move the content around and discovered that a lot of food hadn't been eaten yet. Worms don't eat food immediately after you leave it in there, it takes a few days before the scraps get really gross and worm enticing. I guess my friend had a bag of apples that went bad, 'cause I saw several almost full apples in the bin. It really looked like there was enough food in there for another week. But the soil was really wet (the bins were left outside and we've had pretty rainy weather), and there was no bedding left, so I shredded a few sheets of newspaper and mixed it in, along with egg shells (to rebalance the acidity). I left the other bin untouched, the worms had enough food.
So, it will be another week (at least) until I can start keeping kitchen scraps in a container on the counter instead of throwing them in the trash. The bins are full of compost, but there was too much uneaten food to harvest. At least that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Labels: composting, friends, weather
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