red wigglers | GALLImore family homeSTEAD

Bench in storm cellar doubles as worm bin. Inside is painted with fish pond epoxy paint.

For the past few months, I’ve only added food to the left-most side of the worm bin in hopes of convincing all the worms to go over and stay on the left side and let me use the castings on the right. I was trying to avoid the time-consuming task of filtering out the worms when I want to use the castings. The plan kinda worked, but there are still lots of worms left on the right side, even though they haven’t had any added food. What I thought was just worm castings has sunk down a good 3 inches, which tells me the worms are still working on it.

Other observations: I had a lot of worms crawl out of the bin this year. I think this was because I overfed them at one point and created a hostile environment. You can see lots of dead worms on the ground.

This bin has worked out very nicely. The worms are safe from critters and haven’t seemed to have any problem surviving the blistering summer heat or the super cold winter.

Aiden and I went on the tour of Texas Worm Ranch that was set up just for the members of North Texas Vegetable Gardeners. A nasty thunderstorm moved in while we were there and we hung out in the bathroom because the winds were so bad the roof next door was flying off.

After we left the worm farm, we went over to Carol Garrison’s urban homestead and she gave us a tour of her front yard vegetable garden, chickens, tropical garden, rainwater harvesting, greenhouse, composting, and fish. She dug up some of her blackberry bushes and a special okra plant and set us home with these plants! I came home and put them in the ground. I just checked on them this morning and they seem to be doing good so far.