Wow! Well, now I have a worm composter. Great, but what to do next? I found out the answer the first time I went down to the basement to check on my little worms to discover… I have ESCAPEES! I retreated upstairs until I felt brave enough (I may have had a glass of wine) to go back down to the basement and clean the worms.
I called the vendor first thing the next day to explain the situation. It’s not that unusual he told me, especially if you’re starting out with as many as 5,000 worms. He then asked if I’d turned a light on for them. I had not left a light on for the little worms. (Instructions are important 
) Easy fix. I will turn the light on. But what to do with these fugitive worms?
Luckily I knew Bruce, one of my coworkers at Hayneedle, liked to fish. I asked him if he was interested in about 2,500 worms, and lucky for me (and him?), he was. So I made a temporary bed for his worms and brought them in for him.
Now I was starting to feel extremely confident that this is going to work well. I did not overfeed the worms, they were starting to eat the lettuce, and things were really looking up. We had about 3 weeks of smooth sailing, until one night I went down to check if my worms were ready for more food, and I bet you can guess what I found: more ESCAPEES!
Again, I call the vendor first thing in the morning, and at this point he is just laughing. “You still have worms jumping out?” he asked.
Yes. Yes, I do.
Basically ,when worms keep jumping out of a compost bin, it means there’s something they don’t like about their new home. The vendor advised me to make a fruit cocktail for the worms. “They will love it,” he assured me.
So last night I prepared a fruit cocktail for the worms: a blended apple…yum. Let’s see how it goes. I’m really starting to get used to these worms.
About “The Green Experience”
Think of “The Green Experience” as a little slice of reality Internet, where anyone can follow one of Hayneedle’s own, Cayden, as she chronicles her transition to a greener lifetstyle on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Her endeavor began with a compost bin and 5,000 worms in her formerly worm-free living space. Follow the “HayneedleGreen” handle on Twitter and check back here for her blog posts. It’s bound to be messy for her, but ultimately a planet that’s a little cleaner for the rest of us.
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