Buying compost is expensive – especially if you buy the organic stuff for your vegetables. Also I don’t trust the little green buckets that you fill with food scraps and leave out for the bin man. Where do they go? Is there a giant council run compost heap somewhere who supplies the gardening centres with expensive organic compost?

So, I bought 1000 red wrigglers for about $20 from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. They arrived in the mail – dehydrated, but primed for composting. I haven’t yet decided if mailing worms is cruel, but I gave them the run of a sizeable box full of vegetable scraps, soil, paper and a little hay. It seemed like a worm paradise to me, but when I removed the lid to water them this morning every single one of the little swines tumbled onto my patio.

It took me about an hour to persuade them all back into the compost. This time I left the lid off, as per Uncle Jim’s previously ignored instructions. Apparently when introduced to a new environment worms like to roam, but they dislike light a lot more than they like the roaming, so leaving the lid off forces them to accept their lot in life and settle into composting my vegetable waste.

We’ll see what happens in the morning!