Worms!
I have finished making my compost bin (pictures later?) and today got grass from our garden rubbish pile to put in the new compost bin, and then was getting decomposing stuff from our plastic compost bin to put on as the next layer before covering it with more old grass and leaves.
The plastic compost bin never really produced any compost in 5 years, but never got full either - it is a black hole of kitchen refuse and weeds. So I took off a layer with the garden fork and was stunned by how many worms there were. They were everywhere, crawling away from the light. There were big tangles of them squirming around getting in the others way so that they couldn't escape. All different sizes of worms. I'm not even sure how such a small amount of compost could support them all. Also, the compost was very dense, and there were areas that probably got little air and did not decompose much at all, so it didn't really look like a good worm-farm kind of matter.
I decided not to put all of the half-made compost in the one layer in the new compost bin so I could save some worms for further up the new heap. I put the stuff in a container to carry it down to the new bin, and when I tipped it out, 16 worms remained inside it crawling on the walls. Fifteen of them were over 5cm long, one was barely 2cm, so there could have been other very small ones I didn't count. Overall there must have been several hundred worms in a 50cm cubed volume of old kitchen scraps. Phenomenal.
I don't mind worms at all normally, but the sight of so many kind of creeped me out and I brushed worms off the outside of the container and wore gloves so none would get on me and then got paranoid about worms crawling on me and had to have a shower. Like I said, normally they are just common little harmless things to me, but crawling everywhere they were disturbing.
I wonder how they all got in there. The compost at this time was not resting on the ground. The bin has a little opening in the bottom and I had scraped out the compost from the bottom of the bin a few weeks before, in winter, and the rest of the stuff was so jam-packed in it was held about 15cm off the ground. There were a few worms in the compost I got out a few weeks ago, which I was happy about, but there weren't many and I carefully put them in the ground or back in the bin. So either the few worms in there bred and grew a lot in the first 2-3 weeks of spring, or they were all contained in this mid layer of the bin the whole time. I have dropped the odd worm in there over the last 5 years, or maybe the progenitors came out of the ground - but there are VERY few worms in our ground as it is so hard, all clay. I've probably found about a dozen worms not in the compost bin. It is a bit of a mystery, but totally fascinating.
I have pictures of a different kind of amazing worm I found a few weeks ago that I might post later. I didn't photo these ones as it was twilight so bad for photography. They were a far more orangey colour than I expect worms to be (the ones you see on the footpath after it rains are more a pale pink).
The plastic compost bin never really produced any compost in 5 years, but never got full either - it is a black hole of kitchen refuse and weeds. So I took off a layer with the garden fork and was stunned by how many worms there were. They were everywhere, crawling away from the light. There were big tangles of them squirming around getting in the others way so that they couldn't escape. All different sizes of worms. I'm not even sure how such a small amount of compost could support them all. Also, the compost was very dense, and there were areas that probably got little air and did not decompose much at all, so it didn't really look like a good worm-farm kind of matter.
I decided not to put all of the half-made compost in the one layer in the new compost bin so I could save some worms for further up the new heap. I put the stuff in a container to carry it down to the new bin, and when I tipped it out, 16 worms remained inside it crawling on the walls. Fifteen of them were over 5cm long, one was barely 2cm, so there could have been other very small ones I didn't count. Overall there must have been several hundred worms in a 50cm cubed volume of old kitchen scraps. Phenomenal.
I don't mind worms at all normally, but the sight of so many kind of creeped me out and I brushed worms off the outside of the container and wore gloves so none would get on me and then got paranoid about worms crawling on me and had to have a shower. Like I said, normally they are just common little harmless things to me, but crawling everywhere they were disturbing.
I wonder how they all got in there. The compost at this time was not resting on the ground. The bin has a little opening in the bottom and I had scraped out the compost from the bottom of the bin a few weeks before, in winter, and the rest of the stuff was so jam-packed in it was held about 15cm off the ground. There were a few worms in the compost I got out a few weeks ago, which I was happy about, but there weren't many and I carefully put them in the ground or back in the bin. So either the few worms in there bred and grew a lot in the first 2-3 weeks of spring, or they were all contained in this mid layer of the bin the whole time. I have dropped the odd worm in there over the last 5 years, or maybe the progenitors came out of the ground - but there are VERY few worms in our ground as it is so hard, all clay. I've probably found about a dozen worms not in the compost bin. It is a bit of a mystery, but totally fascinating.
I have pictures of a different kind of amazing worm I found a few weeks ago that I might post later. I didn't photo these ones as it was twilight so bad for photography. They were a far more orangey colour than I expect worms to be (the ones you see on the footpath after it rains are more a pale pink).
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