Admittedly, with all the festivity going on lately, my last few posts have been rather boozy. We’ve celebrated the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, Chinese New Year, Winter Olympics, local PGA Golf and Mavericks Surfing tournaments and Fat Tuesday. Oi vey! Today is Ash Wednesday, time to bring it back down to earth and remember where we all come from.
Feeling the need for balance, I acquired a worm bin. Every experienced gardener knows that the lowly worm is a key player in the ecosystem drama of the garden. Good food starts with good ingredients and good ingredients start with good soil. Worms and their castings (another word for poop) not only dramatically increase the fertility of soil, but ward off pests and keep diseases at a minimum. Regular feedings with worm castings and worm casting tea (yum) will cut down on the need for expensive amendments, fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides. The cultivation of worms is called Vermiculture, and a worm bin is a little worm farm contained in a system of trays providing a composting system that converts ordinary kitchen waste and paper into nutrient rich black gold. It reduces the amount of garbage otherwise destined for landfills and is 100% organic.
Once I got my worm bin, I needed to get the worms. After some research, and determined to keep it local, I placed a “Worms Wanted” ad on Craig’s List. Later on in the day, while Googling my way into live stream programming to watch my surfer heroes compete, a worm wriggled its way into my computer. Suddenly my screen froze up with warnings that a worm had invaded my system. Yikes, a virtual can of worms, not exactly what I had in mind!
My sweetie spent a good part of Valentine’s Day morning eradicating the virus that had wormed its way into my computer. It was oddly romantic in a chivalrous sort of way, my protector out there on the front lines of cyberspace securing me from invaders.
In the end I dug up a bag of juicy red compost worms from a fellow gardener, and am well on my way to bigger and better veggies. Lesson learned: Be careful what you ask for.
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