Wiggly coolness

I have a WORMERY! Big w00t to my family for ganging together to buy it, and big w00t to Wiggly Wigglers for supplying me with the little oligochaetes (as well as having a sublimely silly name). Our garden is too small and concreted over for a compost heap, but this little beauty is free-standing. You put your kitchen waste in - excluding citrus fruit and onion skins, they're too acidic - and over time the worms munch it up and poo it out into a lovely rich compost. It has a tap at the bottom to drain out the ganky fluid that falls through, which is a also a rich fertiliser you can dilute and put on your garden; in our British summer weather, however, it's been coming out ready-diluted and I've had to leave the sump tap open to stop the whole thing filling up and drowning my worms. There's also a very robust population of Drosophila fruit flies and black flies infesting it, and every time I lift off the lid a cloud of insects erupts forth. The wet weather is keeping the numbers down though, and I've placed some strategic fly paper around it to try and decimate their population. Theyr'e not harmful, just bloody annoying.

It also means that we're lowering our waste stream to landfill, and our contribution to methane outgassing will be lower as well. We put out one black bag every fortnight! More about rubbish in a later post though.