Today was THE day. After weeks and weeks of feeding our worms all the banana peels, coffee grinds, egg shells, lettuce, bread, tortillas, avocado peels, artichoke stalks, edamame pods, artichoke petals, and other miscellaneous scraps from the kitchen, it was time to spread the love! We were looking forward to this day ALL WEEK!
The plan was to take out the lower of two trays in our worm composting bin and use the castings to feed our outdoor plants, as well as to enrich the soil for re-potting 10 indoor plans I bought recently. (Click here to read more about our bin set-up.) To prep for this momentous occassion, we had added the second tray to the bin around three weeks ago and began putting the food in this upper tray in order to encourage our worm friends to migrate up.
Happily a majority of the worms did actually make the move to the upper tray like they were supposed to, but there were still almost two hundred worms mixed in with the castings we wanted to harvest. We’re lazy, but we did manage to pick out around half of them and threw them back into the bin. The rest are now living “out in the wild”, somewhere in the garden.
Without going into too much detail, let me just say that the castings were not odorless. I’m not really sure why, but I expected the castings to be pretty much odorless. Maybe because the bin itself doesn’t really emit much of a smell, or maybe because potting soil doesn’t really have a bad smell, or maybe because I hadn’t thought it through well enough. In any case, we soldiered on, smell and all.
While one person cleaned out the water retaining part of the bin – where the “worm tea” accumulates – the other began spreading the castings around the yard. Lucky for me, I was the one spreading the castings around the yard – under the calamanci tree, around some of the flowering plants that I don’t remember the name for, under the mexican pepper bushes, under the lemon tree. You get the idea. Meanwhile, my much braver half got the job of cleaning out the tea holder, where some mysterious, floating, non-composting worms had managed to make an appearance and breed to their little hearts’ content.
To tell the truth, once I got away from the pile of castings in the tray, the smell wasn’t so bad. Probably the most surprising thing about the castings was how heavy they were. They are super dense. This is probably something a real gardener would know. But not me. The consistency of the castings came as a total surprise. In fact, the castings were so heavy that the mesh-like bottom of the tray had started to buckle.
In the end, we used up all the castings in the tray, filled a few gallon jugs with worm tea, and are happy to continue with feeding our worm friends in tray #2. But next time, I doubt we get as excited about harvesting time as we were this past week.