Worm update

So, it's been 2 weeks and all my worms are alive!! They are getting a little hot in the summer heat so I may need to put more holes in the box. I'm amazed at how fast they eat all the food I put in there. Ok, I do go a little crazy sometimes and blend up the food to make it easier and faster for them to eat. But I need those castings! My garden isn't looking so good. I have BIG hopes for next year's garden though!!

WORMS!

Each year I try to add something new to our little homestead. Today it was worms!!

I learned how to set up my worm bin from Wormbincomposting.com.

I went to a local worm composting class. Then with some other families, we order 5,000 worms. I got them in the mail today and thought something was wrong. The bag was filled with a peat moss type filling and when I poured it out I found a few worms. They didn't look too healthy. I was a bit discouraged. I kept poking around until I found them. And let me tell you, I'm not afraid of much when it comes to nature. I am a science teacher and I've held a lot of creatures including snakes. But when I found this massive pile of knotted up worms I got a bit creeped out. It looked like a big pile of maggots. They worms are not that large, not like night crawlers. Well, I've put them in their new home and they are getting acquainted now.  I have high hopes that they will live, grow, multiply, and provide me with lots of good worm castings for my garden. The kids are even talking about starting a business selling worms if they multiply like they say they are supposed to.

If you want to learn about Vermicomposting, that's was worm composting is called, www.instructables.com has great instructions that will get you started.

Gardening

    
We have begun working in our garden to get it ready for the spring planting. We use the Square Foot Gardening method but have decided to do a lasagna garden inside each square foot plot. Lasagna gardening is an inexpensive way to build the soil and prepare the bed. We didn't do much work in our garden last year so it really became overgrown with weeds.

This is how our garden looked before we started. We had to pull all the weeds out first.

                                        

After the weeds were pulled, we dug all the dirt out of the squares and put it in a wagon.

          

Once all the original dirt was out, we began to layer. We started with shredded newspaper. For a correct lasagna garden, you should layer wet pages of newspaper to kill out the weeds. We had no weeds since we dug them out, so we shredded it to help the worms in the decomposition.

    

Next came a layer of leaves.

        

Then we proceeded to layer the original soil, with peat moss, and compost. 

        

Finally, we covered it with 2 layers of plastic. We should be using black plastic, but we don't have any. This will "cook" the compost to help it to decompose quicker.

 

We should be ready to plant in about 3 weeks. Next, we need to start the seedlings....