The Great Worm Escape

I’ve read that you can always tell something is wrong with your worm bin if your worms try to escape. Too much acidity, heat from decomposing food and other organic matter, excessive dryness or moisture——there are a lot of things that make worms want to flee. I don’t know what happened in my bin, but last Wednesday morning I went down to the basement to check on the worms and was horrified to find most of them plastered to the underside of the bin’s plastic lid.

Not wanting to squish anyone, I carried the worm-covered lid upstairs to the kitchen along with the rest of the bin. Deadlines were pressing, but I couldn’t just let the worms suffer. So I made myself a cup of coffee, put on an old Smith’s CD (because nobody puts an upbeat spin on misery quite like Morrissey) and sat down on the kitchen floor to sort worms into a separate, clean container.

A little over an hour later my kitchen floor was a disaster area of worm bin dirt and goo. But the worms were safely tucked into fresh bedding in a new bin. I know they’re deaf and blind, but I’d like to think that between Morrissey and the reassuring things I told them during the move, the worm’s traumatic experience wasn’t so bad. This I know means I’m probably not cut out for worm composting. Most books on the subject talk about worms as if they are machines rather than living creatures. It’s their job to turn kitchen waste into vermicompost and if they die in the process, well, get some more, the attitude seems to be.

As a gardener who is new to worm composting, I’ve found Mary Appelhof’s book, “Worms Eat My Garbage,” extremely helpful and informative. But I have to say that her all-research-and-no-empathy approach to worms  has nearly given me nightmares when I’ve read the book before bed. If they go hungry, who cares. If they freeze to death, oh well. If you need to grab a handful to go fishing, hey, that’s what they’re there for!

It’s probably just as well that I didn’t try to go to school to become a scientist. And, incidentally, Appelhof notes in her book that it’s a myth that worms that are cut in half always grow a new body. Turns out, only the part with the head grows a new tail. The severed tail end is pretty much hosed.