wool & stars

We went to a nurs­ery in North Port­land called Pis­tils today and bought a pound of red wig­gler worms. It took a while for them to rus­tle up the worms–be pre­pared to wait if you go. There’s plenty to look at while you wait, includ­ing the res­i­dent chick­ens (and chicks!)

Our worm bin is made from a large plas­tic stor­age con­tainer. Gideon drilled some air holes into it, and I shred­ded news­pa­per to use as bed­ding. After damp­en­ing the news­pa­per to wrung-out sponge con­sis­tency (as rec­om­mended here) we added some food scraps that have been wait­ing in a bag for a few days. Appar­ently, that is a good idea because the food starts to break down, mak­ing it eas­ier for the worms to use. I’m excited because a large per­cent­age of our garbage is compostable.

I’d still like to get an Earth Machine — the city of Port­land / Metro offers them for $35 — because I’m not sure our ver­mi­com­post­ing bin will be able to han­dle all of our scraps. I’m also on the quest to fig­ure out what to do with lit­ter box waste? I am still research­ing that. We use a pine-based lit­ter. There must be some alter­na­tive to throw­ing used lit­ter into the garbage. Appar­ently, flush­ing is not a good solu­tion because it’s been linked to sea otter death.