New enhabitants of our urban homestead - WORMS!

Well our much anticipated arrival of our worms has happened.  We didn't expect them until tomorrow and we are waiting on our worm farm bin to arrive tomorrow as well... So this means our new arrivals are in temporary quarters until the bin arrives.  We ordered 2000 worms or 2 lbs to get things started as quickly as we could.  The worms look a little rough for wear considering they just arrived from PA to Colorado.  The instructions indicate this is normal.  I do seem them moving around in the dry peat moss they were shipped in, but they are not happy about being so cold or so dry.   So I put them in a 5 gallon bucket with some cardboard strips along the bottom of the bucket and placed a lid over the top of the bucket.  Then I put them in there and then started taking things out of my compost bucket that I put my kitchen scraps in.  To give them something to eat and a splash of water to get them something to work with. 

They warn that there could be a worm escape attempt until they get used to the new home.  Sadly I will be upsetting them again here shortly after the new bin arrives so we will see how they do.  We are excited to have them here.  It means we get to convert our kitchen and garden material to compost immediately and give everything a big boost in fertility.  We also have horse manure we will be feeding them to give them something to eat even when we don't have the food scraps to feed them.  We have source for the horse manure that is close and all we have to do is go get it.  Which we have already been doing for our garden beds.  So it is great to have something we can feed our worms and grow their population and improve our garden in the process.  It is exciting and fun. 

We will post some pictures and some info about vermicompost and how this works as we go.  I used to have worms some time back and that was a learning experience, but I found myself distracted with other things and didn't continue.  So I am glad to have worms back here at our urban homestead.  Hopefully we will be able to double our worm population this year and really get our compost production moving along.  I am really looking forward to seeing how the garden beds respond to the new source of nutrients. 

I hope your having a wonderful day!  God Bless!

Longsnowsm