I cannot believe that I am typing this, but one thing I
missed over the past 2 years was our worms! They are just so amazing at eating our scraps and giving us
beautiful and rich compost.
Managing a worm composter is almost easier than a conventional compost
bin… seriously.
This time I wanted
to give our 1000+ new best friends a strong start and also a quick one, so I began saving food
scraps in a glass jar in the freezer before they even arrived. It filled up fast. Now what? I don’t know about you, but I
just did not want to take the time to cut all the peels, etc into tiny pieces,
which the wiggly things can consume easier. One day after cooking I saw my dirty food processor sitting
on the counter. Hmm… it’s already
dirty. Why not use it? I threw all of the peels, stems, and
veggie ends in and gave it a whirl.
Niiiiice. Perfect. It wasn’t yet feeding time, so I put
that back into the glass jar and in
the freezer it went.
(Yes, it looks nasty. Can you tell I had been processing lots of kale from my garden?)
On feeding
day I simply placed the jar of frozen scraps on the counter until it was thawed
enough to scrape out. Oh man! I
cannot even begin to tell you how FAST they ate it up! Now, not only can I store more in my
glass jar, but I can get them to eat more of our food bits!!! And faster!!!
Because they go thru chopped up bits
quickly, I have virtually no flies now too. Bonus. If you
can keep your worms indoors you should not have fly issues at all but, if you
are like me and have kids and a puppy that love to peek in on their little
friends, you will keep them outside in a sheltered location. As long as the food is eaten in a
reasonable length of time and you keep it covered, you should also not have
problems outside. I always cover
the new food with 1-2 layers of newsprint, preferably printed using soy
ink.
(Yes, my worms live in my messy garage...the main place in this house left to unpack and properly organize. There's something about garden season that makes us just ignore the mess in this space. Hopefully we'll get to it by winter. But wait, neighbors tell us we can keep growing things almost all through the winter here.... uh-oh!)
Do you vermicompost? Do you want to? Leave your tips, tricks or questions in the
comments. I'd love to hear from you!




















It was so easy and they turned out so cute. I really enjoyed seeing my 7 and 3 year olds making up their own color combinations and then giggling with excitement when the new crayons were cooled enough to take out of the molds!











Another one of my favorite ideas is to use reusable sandwich baggies as gift bags! This cute bunch have handmade biscotti inside. These are available in my Etsy shop in assorted colored ripstop nylon (the material is made in USA!) and also in upcycled cotton prints and organic cotton solids.
Or consider wrapping a gift in a reusable produce bag. Many people already have cloth grocery bags - help them totally ditch single-use plastics at the grocery store while also reducing your wrapping paper use! I think these would be beautiful tied with a BIG fat ribbon.
There's also the amazing Japanese art of furoshiki, wrapping things in fabric. Use a scarf and it's 2 gifts! Here's a website with a great instructional pic of many of the basic techniques... http://xorsyst.com/japan/how-to-tie-furoshiki/ 




