Thriving on Neglect

When I left for vacation a few weeks ago, I assumed that I would need to buy another pound of worms upon my return because there were precious few that I found when I was transferring the contents from my homemade bin to my Gusanito bin. In a last ditch effort not to lose my last few Indian Blues, I put some papaya rinds and seeds in the bottom two trays which also had a lot of newspaper bedding and hoped for the best.

Two weeks later...

As soon as I got home from the airport I opened up my bin and to my surprise my two bottom trays were teeming with happy wigglers! There must have been several eggs hatch during my absence. It was expected to see them acclimatize to their new environment so rapidly.


Before I went on vacation (pre-papaya). Incredibly, my original bin looked like this for many months despite several feedings. There was very little decomposition and my worms began to slowly die off. So, I determined to by a decent bin, and it's made all the difference in the world as you will see in the pictures below.


This is what my bin looked like when I got back home. Unfortunately by the time I took this picture, I had already opened the bin up a couple of times so most of the worms had already burrowed down. But you can see that all of the food scraps I had left are gone. After taking this picture I added some more papaya and avocado rinds.


One week later.

Evidently, worms love papaya because it doesn't take them long to turn it into lovely compost. And lucky for me, I have two papaya trees in my yard which have born very well this year.

Part of the reason that the worms began to flourish, is not only because the Gusanito bin eliminated the pest problems I was having (slugs and lots of coqui frogs) and improved the aeration and compartmentalization, but also because I wasn't opening up the bin and disturbing them as often. It's also more pleasant for me, because now my digging down into the vermicompost most likely won't result in the unpleasant discovery of a centipede (which was a fair possibility in my previous bin). The key is that a healthy bit of neglect provided the opportunity for them to make themselves comfortable in their home, but they were not abandoned to the point where they would have been forced to go and forage for food elsewhere.

LESSON LEARNED: Keep your worms fed, but don't become another one of their common pests.