Worm Emergency!

The worm honeymoon ended abruptly last week when temperatures in their warehouse home reached the low nineties. It was kind of amazing to see how quickly the little ecosystem that had been working so well crashed and burned. Witnessing the collapse made my recent viewing of An Inconvenient Truth that much more poignant.

The timing was really off as I had just added a large amount of food a few days before the temperature increase. It was by a large margin the largest amount I had added in a single feeding. Things had been going so well I thought I would try to pick up a little speed. Turned out to be a really bad idea. I learned that as the heat goes up, the worms stop eating, and the food gets nasty really quickly. I left for the weekend, and came back to one hundred degree worm soup. Not good at all.

In an attempt to lower the temperature I first moved them outside into the shade. My thinking was that the cooler nighttime temps combined with the daytime breeze would cool things off. Didn't work. It actually got quite a bit worse. The temperature went from the high nineties, already well over there 80 maximum, to about 112. By the point the bin hit 112 I was in the third level and the unit was really heavy and dense. I figured I would have a much easier time cooling it down if I could remove some of the mass. Since the first bin was almost entirely done, I poured it out and recovered the remaining worms. The second layer was in the worst shape because it bore the brunt of the heat. The last layer of food I had added started to get pretty nasty and leaving it outside for a day attracted a ton of flies. So I dumped it outside, and recovered as many worms as possible. I added all the refugees to the third layer.

With the mass reduced I added one of those freezable blue ice things to the top layer. I encased it in a large ziplock bag and dug it right into the top layer of compost. Within an hour or two the temp dropped back down to the low eighties and the worms huddled around it. At that point I moved the bin temporarily to the coolness of my parents basement and then on to their new location in the closet of my air conditioned home office. It's an experiment, we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, the image above is the first layer of compost. Dried out it is just under five pounds and is now fertilizing the bamboo in my office.