Wormless Worm Composting Anyone?

Sigh. I am a bad worm keeper. I killed my poor little critters after almost 3 years of raising and nurturing them, and sharing with friends and family.

This summer I gave quite a few worms away to friends and loved ones. I just can't share my enthusiasm enough. I love(d) worm composting. It is so easy, so awesome, so fun for the kids, and my plants love the bi-product.

But after giving away a substantial portion of both of my worm bins, I decided to combine the remaining worms into one bin, and then harvest the casings. Honestly, this is the hard process for me. My bins always are wet, so I have to let it dry out some, and I have to kind of "starve" the worms (read, let the worms eat all the visible food) and then "bribe" them to one end of the bin with some special yummy treat.

So this means that I leave off any lid that I may have on the bin. FM does not like the thought of worms in our basement, so I agreed to keep a lid on it, errr, lid on them. snicker. Anyway, I took the lid off both bins and waited for a week or so to let the casings dry some. I stopped feeding both bins - well why would I feed an empty one, duh - and was waiting a few days to feed them one of the melon rinds from our garden.

Well, then school started. And I forgot about them. Completely forgot about them. I've let the worms go without food for a few weeks at a time before, and while I am sure they were not happy worms gorging on tons of fresh kitchen scraps, they did survive just fine.

But like I said, I completely forgot about the poor worms. For like, uhhhh, 4 months. Now don't go and call the Humane Society on me, please. I have to keep the little critters in an out of sight place, and well, lets just say that this year has been a very hectic year and I am struggling to get a handle on our schedule. (You can use your imagination to guess what our laundry situation looks like. And the dog hair; well that has had some moments too.) So when I was clearing dishes one evening and scraping the scraps into the frozen heap of compost material, I realized (Duh!) I had not fed my worms in a long time.

I ran downstairs with the fresh batch of scraps - which included squash rinds, something the worms love. I peeled back the layer of shredded paper from the worm bin and noticed a hard, dry layer of, well, hard dry stuff. Hmmmm, did any little worms survive? I fluffed up the dirt and added the squash rinds, figuring within a day or two I would see who survived.

It has been over a week, and no worms have come to dine at the squash rind. Yup, I murdered them all. Or, as I prefer to think, they all packed their bags and went to some refugee camp where they could get better care.

Now I have to wait for some of my friends and family members to grow their own population and share worms back with me.