Detritus Catastrophe

This has been a long winter. It even snowed earlier this week and it's nearly spring. I got started on some gardening related activities indoors this year: I got worms! I've started vermicomposting and it was pretty easy at the get go. I would take some kitchen scraps and bury them into the bin and then close it again and go to bed. It was really low maintenance and they were going through the vegetation pretty quickly. In fact, it seemed like they were even multiplying quite quickly.

Captain Obvious was at first a bit put off with this new addition into the house and was not particularly helpful; especially when I told her how much my pound of worms cost. But, she soon realized that they would have to multiply and then I would have more and more offspring coming to age. Which meant that I would in essence obtain more and more worms and might be able to make a side business of this!

The other day, she gave me some broccoli that was kind of off and we both shrugged and added the food into the bin. A few days later, my brother came home and told her that things smelled a bit iffy. She didn't notice but told me to check anyways. The bin smelled pretty bad and I noticed that the worms were trying to crawl out and there was condensation on the bottom of the lid.

  

It was all out war with this rotting vegetation which has now ruined my worm bin! I spent the better part of the evening clearing out the old stuff (even tossing the castings I did get :( ) that was wet and/or dead and then creating a new bin with newspaper and a spray bottle. 

My next steps will have to be to monitor the worms that I do have left since I don't want them all to die and I really need to figure out how to do this right. I will get around to photographing my efforts but at this point, it feels pretty futile since I'm struggling to keep them alive. Seems like keeping non-mammilian pets is not something I'm excelling at.