How a Few Rainy Days Led Me into a Prolonged Worm Daze

It was a rainy spring day, our second in a row, when I called a friend to commiserate. How were we going to survive another day inside with our little ones? We were a few weeks into Covid self-isolatation and still very little was known about what we were then calling the Coronavirus. We had, however, become very familiar with being cut off from normal life. And on this particular day, I’d run out of ideas to calm everyone’s cabin fever and was ready to plop my kids in front of the TV for a movie marathon.

That’s when my friend told me about the worm farm she’d made with her boys the day before. They’d earlier read a kids’ book about the concept at the library, and when the rain started she’d decided it was a good way to entertain her children and teach them about nature. She mentioned the term “vermicomposting” and explained that the worms they’d collected weren’t the best for that purpose, but they were readily available- squirming across driveways and walkways as we spoke.

As soon as I put down the phone, I got the kids in their rain jackets and boots and off we went. At 1.5 and 4, they didn’t really mind being in the rain, but heading out aimlessly with the surely attitude we’d all been fighting seemed like a recipe for disaster. Now, however, we had a mission. Collect as many worms as we could find. We walked up and down our street and around the corner. The hunt was perfect. There were enough worms that my kids stayed vigilant in their search, but not so plentiful that they got bored or filled our container too fast. We were working as a team, which is always fun, and it was something new and different. New and different had been in short supply recently. We wandered around outdoors for 45 minutes before the rain picked up and I pulled everyone inside. By then, everyone was in a better mood. And if that had been it, it would have been a successful activity.

But that wasn’t it. Once we all dried off, my kids rapidly lost interest in our collection of worms. I was relieved that an outdoor reset left both of them happier, calmer, and ready to play nicely together inside, but that also meant that they quite literally left me holding the bag. Of worms.  

I turned to duckduckgo to find out what I needed to give these worms so they’d survive. Well, that’s what I thought I’d done. What I really did was look up the term, “vermicomposting”, thinking that would help me with the sidewalk surfers we’d picked up. I quickly learned that my friend was right, these wouldn’t be great for vermicomposting. And when people talked about “worm farms” it seemed they usually meant vermicomposting. So, what kind of worms were the right kind? Why was this a thing? Why was this a thing that people had written kids’ books about? That’s basically how I headed down the worm hole. (I know, I know. I had to.)

What I learned was that worm composting results in significantly higher quality soil than conventional composting. If I’d ever had any doubts about the importance of the soil quality in plant growth, they’d been put to rest by our first Covid project- renovating our lawn. I was already working on an organic vegetable garden, and it seemed like vermicomposting would help tremendously with that endeavor. What I read promised a higher crop yield with vermicomposting thanks to soil that would be much higher in healthy micro-organisms, and have better water retention capacity and improved soil structure that is great for root growth. It was also said to produce compost with fewer pathogenic bacteria, and more plant friendly nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus.

In additional to producing better soil for our garden, vermicomposting became more appealing as I realized it would make composting in general so much easier. No work required to manually turn our waste to turn it into soil. I had fewer concerns about pests with the set ups I considered than with conventional composting, and it looked like it could be done utilizing considerably less space. In the past, space constraints had precluded my ability to compost, which meant all those nutrient rich food scraps were wasted filling up a landfill instead of being put to good use.

We spent so much more time at home during Covid, the waste I saw going into the trash can had increased significantly as well. I liked the idea of putting it to great use and reducing our trash output. And by composting with worms, that food, paper, and cardboard would turn into usable soil so much faster than if we’d found space for conventional methods (3 months vs. 12 months).

Before the kids’ rain jackets were dry, I’d taken the worms we’d collected back outside, dumped them in our new vegetable garden, and ordered red wrigglers. The hardest part of worm farming that I had left to tackle was telling my husband that we were about to have 2,000 additional mouths to feed.  To be continued…