Unattended Moments

So, nearly one year with no posts - Christmas has come and gone, and it is nearly time to wish you a Happy New Year again.  This is not a good blogging record.  The reason - the job that I started last November continued to be frantically busy through January and into February (not good for spare time, but not bad for overtime pay). At that point I got an assistant, who was very good, but initially that meant time on teaching her a job I was still learning myself.  At the beginning of April I was interviewed for and offered a job in the University IT Service, which I decided would give me wider experience and better prospects than staying put - which meant another round of tidying loose ends and getting a job into a fit state for someone else to take over, and then on to another steep learning curve as I started the new one.  At the same time as I started the new job (July), I put an offer on a house.  The purchase went through quite quickly, and by September I was moving - admittedly only a few hundred yards,  but didn’t reduce the amount of packing / unpacking / sorting of boxes and chasing of banks and utility companies.  And by the time I was settled, the year was pretty much gone…

The new house has a small garden, which brings me to the main subject of this post: the wormery.  I hadn’t previously had any way of recycling kitchen waste - the council doesn’t collect it and I’d had no use for compost before.  With a garden, despite the small size, composting made sense, so my Mum gave me a worm cafe, complete with composting worms.  All well and good, we thought - but for the first week or so the worms seemed to want to be anywhere other than their food tray, and had to be rescued from the sump below, from on top of the lid, and from corners of the shed where I’d put the cafe to keep them out of the cold.  Reassured by Wiggly Wigglers that this was normal behaviour - worms are inquisitive, and are likely to explore their environment thoroughly before deciding that the food tray is the best place to be - my first task on returning from work each day became to check the wormery and restore any roving worms to their proper place.

Having acquired enough bubble-wrap to surround and cover the cafe in order to keep the wind off,  I put it back outside, hoping that daylight would encourage the worms to stay put.  As advised, I gave them plenty of shredded paper to keep the moisture down and all seemed well, until the next crisis arrived in the form of unusually seasonably cold weather and snow: despite the bubble-wrap cover, the moisture blanket inside the cafe froze and the top layer of food looked decidedly frosty.  Strange as it may seem I had grown rather attached to my worms and was rather dismayed by this turn of events, but as I was going away for Christmas I had to put them back in the shed and hope for the best.  On my return there was still ice on the lid and no live worms in sight.  Consulting wiggly wigglers again I brought them just inside, leaving them in the coolest part of the house by the back door to let them defrost slowly.  Within a couple of hours the first worms emerged, and it seems that most have survived the cold.  I’m now wondering what the next mini wormdrama will be - and waiting to see whether the composting is successful.