I post this brilliant mspaint artwork of mine in honor of the fact that our worms arrived today in a cardboard box.  We set up their plastic bin (which came yesterday) and filled it with shredded paper and coconut fiber and dried leaves from outside and bits of celery that went floppy in the refrigerator, etc.  Then we opened the bag they were shipped in and spread the worms over the bedding.  The poor things had clustered into a giant slimy worm ball, which they apparently do when stressed, and they don’t like light, so I didn’t want to take a photo of them.  But they should be settling in now, burrowing down towards the bits of celery.  If all goes well, we’ll soon have a happy colony of wormy goodness to eat our shredded documents and our food scraps, and to contribute to the growth of our plants.  I’m so excited!

(related earlier post) 

(link to where we ordered from)

I’m a sucker for the floral and houseplant displays at the grocery store, especially this time of year when the trees look like nothing but sticks and my gardens are frozen over.  I mean, I’m excited to think about what the gardens will look like in the spring, as the flowers and herbs and shrubs we started last year become more established, but I’m impatient.  I want to water things and trim things and observe new growth from day to day right now.

Today I was theoretically just shopping for chocolate, but I ended up coming home with two little cactus friends nestled into my purse, too.  The cashier gingerly wrapped each one in a plastic bag before she handed it to me, but I still poked my fingers when I unloaded them.  That’s ok, though.  It just shows that they’ve got spirit!  One has a tidy pattern of little spiky clusters, and the other one has a more unruly hairdo of longer spines.  I put one in my office and one in S’s office to greet her when she gets back from her trip.  I’m actually really excited about them.  They’re just so round and adorable.  And the cats can’t nibble on cactus needles like they do on the leaves of most of our other houseplants.  My lucky bamboo has suffered that terribly unlucky fate repeatedly.  Maybe it brought luck to the cats, though.

And winter progresses.  Time passes.  Our paper-white and our geraniums flowered recently.  We have some crocus bulbs sprouting on the windowsill, but no sign of buds on those yet.  The most exciting thing I saw today was some new-looking leaves poking through the ice in a cement urn outside the train station.

I hate having to throw vegetables away, like these poor parsnips, just because we don’t have anywhere to compost them.  It feels really wrong to be putting biodegradable stuff into the trash can in plastic bags, which will then go to the town dump, where we drop them into a big metal bin with everyone else’s plastic bags, and then I don’t even know where they go from there.  Most likely to a landfill, where I know this stuff will just sit in a huge pile with all the other waste, not given the opportunity to return gently to earth like it’s supposed to.  I recently read a book about the importance and beauty of decomposition (Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, by William Bryant Logan), so this concept is especially prominent in my mind at the moment.  But my family has always composted, made new earth to spread on the gardens, nourished gigantic wayward pumpkin vines, tolerated the mess made by squirrels and crows who loot the compost pile for food, etc.  And when S and I lived in Burlington, we happily took part in the town composting program, saved our scraps, brought our smelly white bucket to the recycling center, dumped it out, and then started over again. 

But we don’t have that opportunity where we live now.  At first I thought I’d like to install some kind of composting system in the backyard here.  Even though we’re renting, we do have a small, shared, backyard where we can garden, and our landlady said she didn’t mind if we composted.  But there are a lot of hurdles to make it work in the backyard.  Our back steps are treacherous.  The space is bordered by four other houses, with people who might complain.  Stray cats and squirrels and such would potentially make a mess.  Even with a closed system, we would have to go outside over snow and ice in the winter to bring our scraps. 

I do believe that all of these problems could be overcome, but I’ve instead fixated on an exciting alternative:  worm composting!  This idea makes me happy because I like the thought of keeping the worms as pets.  I already have three cats and a dog, but still…  It’s also a practical idea because the worm bin can be kept inside.  We feed the worms, and they help us break down our waste, which also produces lovely garden-enriching moist brown stuff, and everybody’s happy.  If worms can be happy.  I’m certainly anthropomorphizing them a good bit as I imagine them blissfully munching our wilted lettuce and flaccid carrots.  Come to me, worm-friends!  I have my fingers crossed that my birthday wish will be answered.  In the meantime, I’m channelling wriggly worm-like energy.  I bought a slinky, and sent it walking down the stairs several times as soon as I got home with it, just like a kid again.  In fact, I think I’ll take it for a little walk right now.

I was gardening the other day, getting ready for winter.  In the front garden there was a big sunflower plant that was already growing there when we moved in.  It had lots of happy flowers all summer, but the leaves had been looking kinda yellow and moldy for a while, since it started getting colder, so I decided it was time to cut it down and bring it to the brush pile.  I thought that I would sprinkle a few seeds out of the dried up flower heads onto the garden in hopes of getting more sunflower plants next summer.  But all the flowers were gone.  Because the squirrels took them.  I know because I saw a squirrel in the back yard eating something strange and pale and I had to watch him/her for a while before I figured out that it was a sunflower head.  Maybe they dropped a few seeds, though, and we’ll still get a new plant.  Or we could always buy some seeds in the spring.  I don’t mind feeding the squirrels, but I hope they don’t eat all my bulbs, too, because I want daffodils and tulips in the spring when I’m all desperate for flowers.