Sad day in the ol' Dirt Box.

Our worms are dying. And we are sad.
That sounds odd, doesn't it? Maybe a little backstory will shed some light on all of it.

About a month or so ago, we attended an event (Recycling Night) at Cait's school that offered a "Take Home Recycling Center" (aka. a Worm Farm.) We were to bring a plastic tub/box the size of a shoebox to fashion into the worm holder, and the school would provide the rest (worms included.) Now, before you start to exclaim "Ewwwww ~ Worms, how disgusting!!!!" I should probably note that the ones that my mother has in her worm farm are really clean, do not smell, and quite cute little things. (Ours, sadly, are not the same worms.) So we went to "Worm Night", as the girls refer to it, with the intention of getting our own personal "Take Home Recycling Center".

Fast forward to about a week later, the worms are still fine but they are not eating any of the food that has been put in for them (as a side note, worms consume - something like - 4 times their body weight in a week or something like that.) In fact, the food that we had put into the container for them when we set up the farm had molded. So we began the process of cleaning out the worm box, throwing away all the newspaper, leaves, moldy stuff, etc. (but not the worms :) ) And basically starting all over again. And thus began our quest to keep the worms alive - which I affectionately refer as "Save the Worms - 2007."

My mother came over several days later with some scraps for the worms - coffee grounds, cucumbers, and the like - that her worms had really loved and eaten right up (her worms had liked them so well, in fact, that they had been reproducing by the thousands inside of the coffee grounds.) So we added the scraps and some peat moss to the box, and put them back in the closet (worms HATE light.)

Moving ahead to last weekend (not this past weekend, but last weekend), the worms had eaten through the cucumber, and not much else. Of course, I couldn't exactly tell the difference between the coffee grounds and the dirt, but they had not eaten the carrots or the cabbage that was put into there so I would imagine that the coffee grounds were still in there as well. And there is absolutely no sign whatsoever of any kind of reproduction either (Worms are asexual creatures, does that strike anyone else as odd? Probably just me.) And it was moldy once again. So I cleaned out the box again, and started all over again.

This morning/afternoon I opened up their box and found 1 dead worm and a whole lot of messy, moldy orange and it's peels. They have not eaten any of the food that we had put into there, there is still a problem with molding, and now they are starting to die off. So, again, I cleaned out the moldy stuff, replaced the other stuff, and put in some pieces of apple.

Hopefully, they will live. I know how sad the girls would be if their worms met their untimely end inside of a box in our closet. My mother has already given up hope for them, I think. LOL She offered us some of hers.