Goodyear, AZ-- Where Women Garden and Worms are Nervous

Wife, mother, school volunteer, short order cook, sometime cleaner of toilets, gardening enthusiast and now add to the list the title of worm wrangler. It all began when I spied the can-o-worms composting system in my latest gardening catalog. Worm castings as you may know do all this great stuff for your soil, and with you very own personal composting system you can have all the castings you could ever want. You put your food scraps in and the worms munch away and poop while migrating through the stacking trays of your garbage. In a month or two you have the world's greatest fertilizer, and best of all it's odorless.

But there was a problem. I couldn't bring myself to pay $100 for a bunch of plastic trays. After some research, I found you can make your very own vermicomposting system. Basically all you need is a plastic tub with some wholes in it to let the air in. You can get clever and complicated, but that's about all you need-- and of course worms. They were $40 a pound plus shipping. Somehow it didn't seem right to have to pay for worms, at least not that much. So I sat on this next step in the process hoping another idea would come to mind. It finally did when I was loosening a patch of soil for a planting of cukes. Right there under my nose, wriggling in my trowel were these red, fat little worms. I'd planted worm cocoons last spring throughout the garden, but hadn't really seen any sign of life when I did my earlier plantings. But just in that square foot patch I must have turned up about a dozen redworms.

I decided then and there I could raise my own worm herd. I transferred as many as I could find (all the while praying I wouldn't slice too many in half as I dug down) to a cozy little bucket (with holes) lined with shredded newspaper, delicious banana peels and various other fruit and veggie scraps. Their own little worm paradise. I'm hoping I can get a decent sized population going and move them into a larger bin later. Maybe then we'll be in business.