Hand feeding

Next door neighbor just came over a few minutes ago, slightly frantic. Right next to his back steps were two itsy baby birds. One was dead, and the other had its mouth gaping open for food. They'd fallen or been knocked from their nest. They were about like this one.

As Neighbor readied the ladder to put the baby back in the nest, I rushed to the worm bin and pulled out a handful of castings. I callously ripped a couple of worms into bits and fed the not-even-close-to-fledging poor baby, who gulped them down. Then Neighbor climbed up the ladder, Momma Robin screamed and flew away, and then the baby was back at home.

I hope it lives. I hope we did the right thing.

Stinkin' bloodsuckers

Oy. First mosquito.

I spent this morning getting some of the summer garden in, pre- rainy weekend. One thing I hadn't considered was that last year I had no spring garden. Now that I do, three of the containers I use for overflow tomatoes are taken up with carrots, beets, and (Thank you, Trace) turnips.



So this morning I managed 5 tomatoes, seven pepper plants, and three eggplants. Planning this year will be hodgepodge, but I'm still psyched. On Maria's advice, I'll plant once I harvest. That means I'll have beans in the containers I used for tomatoes last year. Good rotation.

For the record:
Tomatoes-- Sungold, German Beauty Queen, Better Boy, Pink Beefsteak, Brandywine.
Peppers-- Yellow Bell (x 3), and 4 mystery peppers that could be green, red, yellow or purple.
Eggplants-- Black Beauty x 3



I have a new bed that I'm not sure what to do with, and I've identified another portion along the south side of the house that, though skinny, would make a perfect place for more tomatoes. I think I need to go get some more rubbermaid tubs and cut or drill some holes in them to put along the house there. In the new bed I'm thinking that we'll see some cantaloupes and other squash-like sprawlers.

The favas have flowers, and so do the peas! Whee!



Time to go feed the worms. I'm going to try to get them to migrate over to the side of the bin without castings so that I can harvest soon.

Neglect

I've been a bad worm mommy. I keep my vermiculture setup in the outbuilding in the backyard, along with the lawnmower, a broken-down (in the not-put-together sense) stainless wire shelving unit, shovels, rakes, garden accessories and a few more storage items.

I hadn't actually gone out there since about mid-December. And it's been COLD. I've been worrying the last week or so, but unwilling to brave the crazy freezing weather we've been having of late to go check on them.

Today it's warm and sunny, so I trudged out in my slippers to see what the damage had been. The idea of sorting through dead worms and any living ones made my heart beat a little faster than normal. When I unlocked the shed, I felt a very cold and ominous draft come out. I hauled out the bin, grabbed a stick, and took the lid off.

First I lifted the one nested bin out to look in the bottom one, where the worms sometimes fall. There were only a couple down there, which is normal. But. They. Weren't. Moving.

Oh, wait, yes they are. Nice.

Then I used the stick to move aside the shredded paper and see all the little wormy corpses that I'd have to pick out. Ew.

Heh. They're all alive! And they still have food! Poor sweet things. I wonder if they froze solid and then thawed and then lived even through that?

Hardy little mo-fos. Good thing there's not a CPS or Animal Control for red worms.

Saturday morning

Just a few things.

First, it's gorgeous out today. I slept in, because I stayed up until 1:30 (!!) last night, had a chat with the roommate about radio voices, and then headed outside to work on the garden.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned my new bed. Wait. I have talked about it, but not in a long while. It's been a work in progress since last February, when I began to rip out sod. On about half of the plot, I planted zinnias there this summer, a few sunflowers (that didn't do so well), and a raspberry bush that a neighbor gave me. The other half spent the summer covered with a big blue tarp, to kill off the grass.

A while ago I laid (lay?) cardboard boxes over the whole area, and dumped some sawdust that I'd been using as mulch on my veggie garden. Then it just stayed like that. For weeks. And weeks.

Today I finally lasagna'd it. Spread out the sawdust. Then a layer of dried grass clippings. Then a layer of non-decomposed leaves. Then a layer of partially decomposed leaves that had somehow retained moisture in them from god knows then. To top it off, I shoveled the entire pile of well-cooked, well-cured compost over the whole thing. The I took about 7 buckets full of water from my shower, the roomie's and our kitchen sink and got the whole thing wet.

I can't wait to plant it all up this spring!

I fed the worms, too. The roommate worked alongside me while I did all this, cutting the front lawn. I had to show him how, because somehow he'd gotten to this age without every having used a lawnmower. So cute.

******

Yesterday I took my passing angst to AskMetafilter, so that I could see if anyone over there had any ideas what I could do about my boy situation (lack thereof). Interesting responses. If y'all have any commentary on it, feel free to drop it off here.

******

Somehow I've lost 10 lbs or so. I thought my jeans were a little saggy in the ass last night. Sure enough!

Oy

I'm reading that book that everyone else is. I'm near the end of it. I promise not to say anything about the content. But you know how with a suspenseful book there's a point where no matter how late it is, no matter how tired you are, no matter how many other things you should be doing you just can't stop?

I'm there now. I only stopped to write this because it's making me a little overwhelmed and I need a distraction. So maybe you *can* stop. I make no sense. Típico.

I've had a crap weekend. I only left the house today to pay rent and buy gas. I was up at 6 (!) and didn't get moving until 9 or so. I harvested worms for a woman from Freecycle who seems to have bailed on me. She's not responded, and I've a paper bag of slithery things near my front door. They're probably not very happy, but I did leave them with a cantaloupe rind.

I worked yesterday, a couple of hours, and then I did manage to do something social. A movie. Which, though excellent, wasn't a movie it's really necessary to see in the theater. I didn't go for the movie though. I went for the company. And that was way better than the movie.

But still, it felt like I'm just biding my time today. Until what, I don't know.

I dunno. I'm in a negative mood. It will pass. It always does, remember? It's good to document it here, even if I'm slightly freaked about the spike in blog views I've seen happening recently. I still think it's important to be open and such, but it's weird knowing this new site is posting all my entries for an extremely local audience. That I don't know.

Independent grocers

I went over to Sean's house this morning to drop off an old coffee grinder of mine he's planning to use to grind up eggshells for his worms. He lives about as close to SuperCompare as I do to Locopops, so I figured I'd gear up for One Local Summer, which begins Sunday.

I'm one of the lucky OLS-ers, with (Hey Ols! I'm an OLSer now!) easy access to locally-milled, inexpensive, widely-sold flour. So I got some more. Also, picked up some breakfast sausage. It's been a long time (years!) since I've had sausage biscuits and gravy, so that might be my first meal.

I worry about meat in any eating locally I do. I'm what I call a non-practicing vegetarian. What that means is that when I don't think about meat, I have no problem eating and enjoying it. Eating local necessarily creates some mindfulness (which is a good thing), and with meat, well, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK! The veggie in me comes out. So. We'll see what happens...

This is what I picked up today:
• Southern Biscuit flour, self-rising.
• Sausage. Brand? No clue. Can't remember, except that it's from NC. It's one of those paper-packaged ones.
• 2 dozen eggs
• Mount Olive Sweet Gherkins
• Canned tomatoes with vidalia onions
• Anne's dumplings
• Anne's Chicken base
• Maola ice-cream sammies
• Maola chocolate ice cream (pint)
• Maola butter pecan ice cream (pint)
• Maola Vitamin D Milk (just a quart. I've got raw coming!)
• Blueberries
• A sweet potato

Supercompare really carries quite a variety of local foods, but not the micro-local ones. You've got to go to Whole Foods (or the dairy itself...Whole Foods is closer for me) for extremely local dairy. A farmer's market (or CSA subscription) is the only place to reliably pick up stuff from closer than 100 miles.

Pesty

So...not much commentary on yesterday's post, eh? That's fine. I'm just really glad I have found something to stir things up just enough to get me changing the things I need to change.

So, on that note, I woke up today, had a small coffee, took my meds and crawled back in bed.

PSYCHE! OK, yeah I did crawl back into bed, but only for a few minutes while drinking my coffee. Then I got up, put on running clothes, and did day two of the C2-5K program.

I got home, and before you know it I was caught up in garden plans. I did a ton, and it was hard work, man. I hauled and raked and hoed and cultivated and shoveled and flipped. For almost 2 hours of sweat, grime, and sneezing. (I'm not working today)

Garden update:

• My peas aren't what I wanted, but they're fine. It looks like I got something more like snow peas rather than sugar snap peas. And I also got one misfiled pea seed, cause I have some non-edible pod peas at one end of the row.

• The radishes are HUGE and probably should be just cleared out now.

• Thinning the chard was a very good move. What's left is thriving.

• The beets, which are not planted very neatly, are doing well. Nice greens on them, and once I pull the radishes which are sharing their space, I bet they'll have more room to develop and be happy.

• Beans: have buds!

• Tomatoes: various stages of development. One of the Extreme Bush plants I grew from seed is doing particularly well, and it looks like the Indian Stripes I thought were goners will probably pull through. I treated a minor case of aphids with an application of some insecticidal oil. We do have some flowers, people, which bodes well. Tomato pests scare the crap out of me!

• Cukes are fine. They're not extremely quick growth, though, so they're still kind of boring.

• Peppers: another slow growth plant. There are buds on the big plant I got at Barnes Supply over near my house.

• Cantaloupes and straight neck squash: I can't remember which is which, because Sharpie apparently fades quickly in direct sunlight. And I'm not sure if I am supposed to thin them or not. For both crops, Jamie and I planted three seeds in the corner of one of the beds, and all three came up and are thriving. So um yeah. To thin or not to thin?

• Current stock of herbs: rosemary, oregano, sorrel, winter savory, thyme, spearmint, garlic chives, peppermint, dill, basil, regular chives, parsely, sage.

• I planted the raspberries, and it does look like I've got a stock of wild blackberries, as well.

• The green onions look like tiny chives.


Random thoughts: Fainting goats for sale, I'm wearing shoulder pads today. I think I saw poison ivy in my yard and whipped out some Round Up. The robins are extremely happy to chomp on the worms I uprooted when hauling compost. I didn't change shoes to garden and so had to hose them off. But not after I tracked in a ton of dirt accidentally. I wonder what's for lunch? It's past one. I like watching mockingbirds divebomb starlings and grackles. It's kind of cold out today.

Finally getting some good food around here

Ahhhhhhhhhhh

The lingering smell of bacon in my kitchen is playing softly off of the heady scent of cherry-almond buttermilk bundt cake.

That's how you reward a lawn mowing job well done!

Bacon smell comes out with a shower, right?

********

Sometimes I think I should just never think before I do something.

Today I emailed my neighborhood listserv to offer up my extra seedlings to anyone who wanted them. Before I realized exactly what this would mean, I also asked the whole neighborhood if anyone else would be interested in a veggie swap.

And then I listed my entire catalogue, including descriptions of the varieties I chose, lifted directly from the seed company.

The first person to email me back was the president of the neighborhood association. I half expected a "YOU CAN'T GARDEN IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD THE GRASS MUST BE LEVEL AT ALL TIMES" email, but then I remembered that I live in the best freaking urban neighborhood that exists. He basically said, great idea, Stew!

The next person asked if we were related, ha ha ha, because we share the same last name. She is interested in the swap AND came over just now to pick up some seedlings. She's got berries, people. Fruit. I don't have fruit! It was kind of frightening all that we have in common. She has WORMS, too!

Since then, I've had three others email me interested in the swap. It looks like next year I'll have to put in more peas. Half-serious question: anyone have an idea about ways I can barter my veggies?

Heh.

******

Food today so far:
Sunflower bread
Potato
Asparagus
Bacon. (bacon bacon bacon bacon)
Buttermilk
Diet Cheerwine

Cake:
Buttermilk
Eggs
Butter
Southern Biscuit flour
Reconstituted dried cherries

tap tap tap tap tap tap

My bed is full of:

a) clean linens, including duvet cover, sheets and pillowcases
b) pillows
c) non-clothed comforter
d) my $5.99 tailored bedskirt (charcoal tweed)
e) just-washed mattress pad

Poor Jamie has NO idea that one of the reasons I invited her up here was to help me with the housework. (Mom: don't have a cow. I'm kidding) Seriously, though, I do need to put my bedskirt on the bed and rotate the mattress. I can't do it by myself, because the bed is too damn BIG. So yeah, Jamie will come in handy.

I could really go for a nap, for some reason. Maybe it's because it is absolutely glorious outside, which gave me the inclination to go run my hands through the compost bin to see how everything is cooking. It's going well...it's such a nice smell in there! It smells like wet woods.

I was slightly wigged to see a metric crapload of ants living in or near the bin. But really, no biggie. I highly doubt that ants at the far edge of the property line will encourage the other ants to come in and swarm the kitchen, as they have before.

More interesting than the ants are the BIG, FAT woooooorms that are thriving in there. I think they're mostly from the JeniQ load of papershreds that needed more of a compost bin scenario than another trip to her wormlandia for a final breakdown. They've taken over and really plumped up! The worms in the bin are fine, but there's something really exciting about BIG worms. If anyone ever goes fishing and doesn't want to buy bait, well, you know where to find me!

Jamie will be here in about an hour, I'm guessing. I had better get rid of my headache before then.

Off to take an analgesic of some sort....

Long overdue

My recent spate of Do It Yourself projects has been fun, educational, uplifting and fulfilling. One project seems to flow into another, which then leads to a third, until I am barely able to finish one thing before I come up with another.

Yeah, I haven't told you about the worms yet.

Instead, I've been planting, watering, covering with plastic and praying that weather doesn't screw everything up, and then there's was a day trip last weekend to see the endangered Red Cockaded Woodpecker (success!), and it's also time for migration plus that pesky job that's financing all of these projects takes up SO much time, oh but I need to visit Maria and Emily and don't forget to hang out with other friends tomorrow and then I want to go roller skating tomorrow night, but then I find out that there's kind of a "see and be seen" vibe, and I have nothing cute to wear because I have changed size, but that's ok because at least I'm still not smoking, and besides don't you think that things will change a bit this summer with me being so active and anyway I'm sure I can find something that will work and let me skate without drowning in my own sweat, but OOOhhhhh, I can make a new t-shirt that says something cool, and do you think they still make those iron-on letters that are psuedo-velour in the Cooper typeface family*?

Yeah.

Here's a very, very truncated overblown version of making the worm bin, gathering the worms and feeding them.

I bought 3 storage tubs from the drugstore, and brought them home. I drilled areation holes all over two of them, and only on the upper sides for the third. It actually was a lot harder than I expected it to be, because the drill kept cracking the plastic when it would punch through . My friend Ryan called midway through the project, and I invited him over. He took over the drilling job for a bit, but got annoyed/frustrated/worried/concerned/notreallysure about the cracking, and I finished it up.

See Ryan drill. Drill Ryan, drill!


That was on a Friday. On Sunday I went to visit JeniQ. That was the first I realized that I had bought the wrong kind of bin. They should have been opaque rather than translucent. Worms like it dark. Duh.

JeniQ gave me a small box full of about a pound of worms, which rode home in my trunk. I lined one bin with a sheet of newspaper, as Jeni told me to, so that the worms wouldn't just fall down through the holes. I stacked that bin into the one with no holes on the bottom. The third bin went into the shed for later use.** I tore up newspaper into shreds and covered the worms with it, and misted the whole thing with water. I closed the box up, put it away and went in to sleep off my yuck tummy.

The next morning I checked on the worms, and it looked like they had tried to commit suicide by drowning. You need to maintain a moist but not drippy level of humidity in the bin, and I guess I had overdone the water. The bottom bin had collected some puddles, and in the puddles were a couple of biggish clumps of worms. I think they must have crawled through some of the holes in the sides of the bin to get down there, because the bottom layer of paper was intact. I added more paper to make it less wet, and gave them some food to see if it would mollify the wormies. It did.

The worms are alive and well, so far. They live under my house in a crawl space, which I hope will shield them from temperature extremes. It's dark and confined, so I think they'll be good.

*I'll let you know what my t-shirts will look like when I finish them. I'm really hoping that they turn out well. I bought three t-shirts, some iron-on letters and some glittery fabric glue. I have plans for two of the shirts, but am VERY open to suggestions for the third!

**The third bin will come into play when I want to "harvest" the worm poop, a.k.a. castings. I'll line that bin with a layer of paper on the bottom like I did with the first one. I'll stack the full-of-worms bin into the new one and put them both into the bottom bin. Worms move to where the food is, so I'll put food in the new bed, and the worms will scooch down to the lower bin. That will leave their poop in the top bin, ready to spread all over the garden.

UPDATE: JeniQ told me that "the wood" is roller-skater slang for the rink. I was going to make a t-shirt that said "I [heart] wood" (Jeni's joke, not mine, but I'm the one silly enough to wear it). Somehow when I made my test shirt though, I neglected to realize I'd be using up the only W in my pack. So now I have to come up with TWO t-shirt designs. Here's the first:

Constant Struggles

All of a sudden it's after 3 p.m. here. I had the day off today, because my job incorporates lots of 'after hours' work opps. Well, not 'opps' so much as mandates. But that's fine, because I can then take Friday off. Which I did last week, too.

What is NOT fine is finding myself here having accomplished little of what I'd hoped to get done today. Sure I've done a couple of things, but I really needed a solid day's worth of housework/errands running today to catch up on the slack that I've been since I went back to work.

So what you're going to get from me today is a to-do list. I keep having new things come to mind when I'm in the shower or the plant shed, but by the time I think about it again, the task has slipped my mind. My brain gets full pretty easily.

There are so many things...Mom? If you read this, don't bitch at me for the things I haven't done yet. "I know! I suck!" is my only answer, and my deeply felt guilt already takes its toll. For the rest of you, constructive ideas about managing my life are always welcome.

I have the rest of the day today to make as many inroads into this list as possible. Tomorrow a.m. early I'm swinging by Crazy John's place (He LIVES!), and we're going to have a day trip to see some birdies. I've not been birding in a while, and it's the very beginning of migration season. Maybe the painted bunting will come poop on my head! On Sunday, my friend Maria is going to come over to see my house (must CLEAN!) and she's going to help me move the last empty bed into place. Later that day I'm heading out to the BBQ capital of my state, for a training that will take place on Monday.

The ONE thing that absolutely must happen today is the meds buying; the prescription is expiring.

Whew. OK. BREAK!

Kitchen:
• Load dishwasher
• Run dishwasher
• Clean filthy counters
• Sweep
• Mop
• Clean off surfaces...make some order, already!

Bedroom:
• Put away clean clothes
• Wash dirty clothes
• Pick up shoes
• Wash bedclothes
• Find resting places for extraneous surface crap.
• Vacuum and then swiffer and then mop.
• Install new bedskirt
• Rotate mattress

Living room:
• Remove stack of recyclable paper
• Take bedding off of couch
• Swiffer

Extra bedroom:
• Turn table back into a desk after stint as germinating table
• Move desk stuff off of bed
• Put sheets on bed

Health:
• Get last seizure med refill
• Make a call to doc for a new script.
• Find a lab to get thyroid levels checked

Yard:
• Mow lawn
• Plant radishes
• Plant beets
• Plant Swiss chard
• Plant onions
• Plant beans?
• Feed the worms
• Repot the sorrell into the Myküll gift pot
• Water the bed
• Turn the compost pile
• Move dirt
• Move bed frame to sunny spot

Financial:
• Do taxes
• Do 2006 Health Savings Account reimbursements (BTW, I don't care what the savings are. I am NOT organized enough to make this work my way. Never AGAIN.)
• Pay rent
• Pay bills
• Deposit paycheck
• Collect 1/2 of past water bill from deadbeat former housemate (Yeah right. it's only ~$20. I should just write that off. I emailed him about it over a week ago with no response. I get the feeling he's going to "stick it to me!" I feel pretty bad for him...not even willing to pay his past debts.)
• Find new roommate, trying not to be as freaked out by my last bad living experience as much as I was with my last bad job experience...

Car:
• Get bashed in side fixed (mom, this is what you can't bug me about. the anxiety about not having done it is out the roof as it is)
• Fix the windshield
• Take in to see why the maintenence light is on
• Figure out when to get the timing belt changed
• Figure out where to get maintenence done in this new town (Honda owners, any ideas?)

SUNday

I don't feel well. I have worms.

Wait. That came out totally wrong. Let me regroup and start again...

:::clearing throat::: Ahem!

I picked up the worms for my worm bin from the fabulously generous and supercool JeniQ today. I was kind of quiet, because somewhere on the way to Jeni's house I began to feel kind of ill. Almost as though I had a stomach virus.

I stopped at Supermercado León on the way home, because I felt I would DIE without some kind of fruit juice and/or frozen sustenence. I got home, did the minimal amount of work needed to keep the worms alive and happy, and crawled into bed. It's weird to have it so nice out but to feel so gross. The Italian ice I picked up has been hitting the spot, too. I considered getting some Cheerwine or SunDrop sherbet instead, but the mango and piña colada ices are probably the best way to go.

So I'll tell more about the little vermis, but a day by the pool with too much beer and too much sun apparently really did me in yesterday. Back to bed for me.

I'll still have the worms tomorrow.

My work is not done here

Oh my. It's a gorgeous weekend, and I was fortunate to be able to take Friday off, due to long hours early in the week. I've gotten a lot done, including the worm bin. More on that later. There are lots of pictures, but I want to wait until I have the whole thing set up before showing off what I did. (Of course, I dreamed last night that the bin I made fell apart. Can't escape the anxiety!)

More pressing now is the HUGE pile of soil and compost sitting in my driveway. If anything is going to get me in shape it's going to be moving the pile around.

Lookie here:

Um. WOW.

OK, to foment some motivation to move that pile of dirt, I'd like to show off some of my babies that will eventually go IN the beds, as well as the pea babies that weeded and mulched yesterday. I'm a little worried about them, because they don't seem to be getting any bigger.

Seedlings:

In order, from top left, clockwise: jalapeño peppers, sorrell, sweet basil, sweet frigitello peppers (which, BTW, had three germinate yesterday! YAY!), Extreme Bush Tomato, and Indian Stripe tomato.

OK, off to move some dirt, as soon as I put in my contacts. I'm going to a POOL party later on today, where I'll show off, well, nothing except my slight sunburn from yesterday (despite 30 spf protection). But I will drink cold beer from cans.

CHOP CHOP, Dirt MOVER!

p.s. I noticed some Carolina Wrens went to an open house at my bird box yesterday. I hope they liked it. I just hope they get the financing.



Oops: almost forgot the peas:


UPDATE:

Thanks to Imperatrix, I had a happy CD to listen to while I did my work today. I figured I'd kill myself if I tried to make it through the whole thing, but once I got into a groove I didn't even notice the time. Until Deee Lite came on. Ha ha. But no, really, it's almost the last song.

So check this out:


I'm going to be pretty sore tomorrow. But I think I did a decent job of using gravity plus that gray container to the best effect. I used my legs not my back.

See how much I moved? The pile began basically at the lower right corner of the picture. I used the rake to spread the topsoil smooth.


Finally, Michele? I'll buy you some new flip flops, cause, um, looks like I got yours a little dirty, after mine fell apart yesterday. Thank god they were brown to begin with!

Plans, plans, plans and more

Why am I still dreaming about Dave Neuhaus? Maybe Marianne is right and he's actually a Demigod. I'll avoid the minute details of the dream, because really, who besides me cares, right? An overview, however, can't be avoided. If only for my own records.

Setting: my old high school

Dave Neuhaus walked by me in a hallway. He was a senior, but it was today. So he must be about 37 or 38. But he of course, looked the same as he did (GASP!) 20 years ago (Jesucristo todo poderoso, I'm old. when did that happen??????). I explained to him that I was, in fact, NOT stalking him. That's the gist of the dream, but somewhere along the line I also had a shower at a just-barely-not-coed facility. And there was snow. And birds. Gosh my life is boring...same old topics day after day.

Garden:
I have a $126 soil delivery (3 cubic yards) scheduled for Friday. It's going to be 1/2 very rich compost and 1/2 darn rich topsoil. I'll have to shovel it into my beds, but that's fine. It's going to be sunny and in the 80s this weekend. Nice time to be outside!

My early-seeded sorrel is finally showing some vigor, which gives me hope for the sickly-looking, spindly, leaf-curling tomatoes and not-yet germinated sweet peppers.

New Project: Woooooorms!

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a "wanted" email to my local FreeCycle listserv asking/begging for anyone's extra compost bin, or lacking that, a vermiculture setup. I got an email back from this guy Sean, who is a neighbor and enthusiastic vermicomposter. He let me know that it's actually really easy to DIY with vermiculture, and pointed me, in turn, to one JeniQ, who appreciates a good thrift store score (especially when we're talking almost free Danskos). Of course, Sean referred me to JeniQ more for her goodness of vermicomposting outreach than the other things that are cool about her (another birder!!). But at any rate, she's going to be hooking me up with starter worms and technical assistance.

Sean and Jeni and I have been in contact several times since that original email; Sean has offered up a drill to make my bins, Jeni has pointed me to resources, including a blog posts about worm farming in general and how to "harvest" the castings.

Oh yeah. Why worms? I'm allergic to cats, and I wanted a pet.

Just kidding. I want the worm poop. That's all. My bin composting is too slow. I am whole-hog (as opposed to half-pig) into this gardening project, and I want to pamper the planties with the rich goodness of the castings.

(So I can eat the garden products, muah ha ha ha ha ha)

I meet JeniQ on Sunday. Right on.

More to come...