romansland

The worms are coming

Today, I cleaned the worm-bin. What? Yes, I have worms. Keeping worms is not a very common hobby, but it is actually quite interesting. To begin with, I have thousands of pets, which is unique. Also, I recycle my garbage and use the vermicompost to fertilize the plants on our balcony. It forces me to think about garbage as valuable stuff - I now feel uneasy throwing away those nice cauliflower leaves in a normal bin. But most importantly, vermicomposting takes you to the level of very small animals, a category completely ignored by most people.

If you talk about “protecting nature”, most people think about protecting wolfs or panda bears or giant whales or perhaps some rare little plant that has very peculiar needs. Great amounts of effort are put into the protection of certain types of birds, and farmers are supposed to go around bird nests when they mow their fields. But what is nature? It is about all levels of life, plants, animals, funghi and bacteria, eating each other or avoiding to get eaten, and using all these special strategies for that, so we can make nice documentaries about them. If you think about it, most of the life actually happens at the levels of smaller organisms. Unfortunately, insects and worms have an extremely low “aaibaarheidsfactor” (Dutch word invented by Rudy Kousbroek, qualification of how much people like a kind of animal).

The worm-bin can give you nature on your own balcony. There is a whole zoo of animals in there: woodlice, mites, centipedes, snails, spiders and many things that I can’t even see. Keeping worms lets me think at the level of the worm: potato peel, mmm! Banana peel, not so good because of the pesticides. Hey, there is a staple on this teabag, you can’t eat that!

Keeping worms is quite easy. I read a book called “Worms eat my garbage” by Mary Appelhof which explains it all. I have about 0.5 kg worms. A worm-bin does not smell if properly set-up, because there is no anaerobic decay. It does not take much time, except once every few months when the worms need to be separated from the ready compost. There are perhaps easier methods than hand-sorting, as I did, but I am still only learning…