Vermiculture Parenthood

Remember my rice babies? That was the first time I realized I had a maternal instinct.

Now I have more babies – lots and lots of babies! I refuse to touch them and I think they’re kind of gross but I carried them in their box with some soggy newspaper all the way from the Concordia University greenhouse farm school today to my house, and settled them into my kitchen.

And it turns out I’m an overprotective mom. If those gosh darn ants that attack my molasses go after my worms, so help me…

I came home today with a vermiculture compost plastic tub full of hungry worms all ready to munch my organic waste. They don’t like pests or too much humidity and I have a feeling there are going to be mites, but I can handle that. Tomorrow or the next day I’m going to put my first pear core in for them to munch. Maybe a banana peel. Probably some mushroom tips. Nothing with pesticides on it.Then they’ll be fat and happy. That’s the Italian grandmother in me.

I’ll be honest, I spent about 4 hours at farm school today learning a little about crop rotation and a lot about how much I hate cramped spaces full of people not being productive, but then I found a glue gun, a drill, some plastic containers and some breathable material to cover the holes in said containers, and suddenly everything was good. I even managed to avoid having to pick the worms out of the greenhouse’s compost boxes. Glue gunning is pretty zen, it turns out, and definitely a cleaner option.

I thought they were gross until I was walking home (my worms), but then I realized I was being more careful than usual to avoid bumping into people. I would start to get a little angry when someone seemed to get in my path, as if they were trying to hurt my worms. Guess I’m a mom after all. A worm mom. This is not a step in any direction other than toward composting.