Welcoming our new family members!

I was very excited to come home to find some packages on the front doorstep today! The smaller box had a fabric bag inside, filled with soft earthy stuff. What's that all about?!


That's one pound of Eisenia foetida - red worms! - packed in a compost/coir mix as far as I can tell.


These worms are much smaller than what you typically think of with earthworms. The larger "nightcrawler" worms apparently like a stable environment, can have a burrow six feet deep, and consider it their home, while these little guys can deal with a less structured environment, and don't need a permanent tunnel for their home.


Concerned the worms were a little dry from their travels (it's close to 90 again today), I spritized the packing material with water and resealed them temporarily. Time to open the big box!


Turns out the Can-O-Worms is all about using as much of the packing material as possible - so that cardboard "lid" you see there? It'll get eaten by the worms over time. And the paper wrapper holding the coir (coconut fiber) you see below also goes in the mix.


First - soak the coir block. It'll absorb water the worms need, and fall apart to become nice and crumbly.


Then start assembling the Can-O-Worms. First I screwed in the spigot and put the legs on the base part. Any water and worm pee will collect in this bottom part - you can later drain that out via the spigot and your plants will love it! Interesting point - the center of the base container has an upward cone in the middle. Any worms that fall down in can use this to get back up to the next level!


Then you add the bottom tray. There are three trays like this. You start with the bottom tray, the soaked coir, the worms and their packing material, and if there's still room, you can add some food for them.


Before adding the crumbly coir, you put in the cardboard packaging - this'll stop the coir from falling through to the bottom container. Over time it'll get moist and the worms will consume it, and then pooping it back out as worm castings along with anything else they eat. At this point it was time to move it down to the basement...


I added the soaked coir (squishing out most of the water, but still leaving it damp), and then poured on the bag of worms.


Since they don't like light, I'm sure they hated the flash! Within minutes they were buring down into the bedding materials.


Turns out between the coir block AND the packing material they came in, the bottom most layer was a bit crowded. Rather than push down too hard and run the risk of squishing anyone, I put a couple handfuls on the next layer up. The instructions say that once a layer is full of worm castings/bedding, they'll start working their way up to the next layer, which is where you'll be putting their food. Only once the third/uppermost layer (which I don't use yet) is full do you start consindering taking the bottom layer of casting for your compost/garden/potted flowers.


I tore up and added the egg carton that came with them (I'm assuming just to bulk up the packaging and buffer them?), and covered them with a moist layer of newspapers. They'll breakdown/consume the egg cartons and newspapers as well as anything else I feed them. The instructions the worms came with said to hold off feeding them for a week while they get settled, while the Can-O-Worms and a book I'm reading both said you could feed them right away. I know *I* like to eat after travelling, so I put in half a banana peel (chopped up), four tea bags, and a swiss chard leaf from yesterday... I won't over burden them with too much food until they show they're handling what I give them. Later I'll be able to add more non-fat, non-dairy, non-meat, non-bone food waste, shredded paper, cardboard egg cartons, and more. Some literature says you can even give them what comes out of the vacuum cleaner, but I'm worried about synthetic fibers.


And finally it was time to close 'em up with the lid and let them do their thing. It can take up to a year before the system is really going strong - so this'll be all about patience for me. At least in the basement they won't have the crazy temperature fluctuations that they'd have in a black plastic container outside in NE Ohio!