My worms and I

My worms and I have had a tumultuous relationship. When we first met (they were delivered to my door), I cut the bag open and peered inside and there they all were, just pink and wriggly and innocent-looking.





O, how exciting, I thought to myself. Hundreds of teeny tiny worms, all my own.

I felt like a proud mother. "The worms arrived," I would tell people. "They're doing really well in school (the mud)."

Mistakenly, as described in K is for...., I thought I had ordered a home for the worms. I had not. So the worms were put in a big saucepan to live until I could work out what to do. "Worms," I was told in my worm blurb, "do not like sunlight and will automatically burrow down into the mud."





Brilliant, I thought, I don't need to worry about them. They will just burrow down.

Then the evening drew in and the natural light faded. And this is when the other part of the worm blurb, which I had not read, became relevant. "Worms," this section read, "are naturally inquisitive and like to explore."

Ah...

This is a problem....

After an evening out seeing friends, I got in quite late. It was probably after midnight.

Let me check my babies are ok, I thought to myself, smiling happily at my new status as full time mother. I opened the door to the little back porch type area where I had left them.

They.

Were.

EVERYWHERE.

And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. I switched on the main kitchen light and saw them crawling all over the kitchen floor! A good portion had made off in the opposite direction for the outside world but in their rush to get out had, stupidly, all mashed into a little hole at once and become stuck. I couldn't get a hold on any of them and they couldn't move (they are still there as it is impossible to get into).

Infuriated, I gave them a real telling off whilst gathering them up.

"You were supposed to burrow, you idiots, not climb out!" I raged, stomping around in the garden with a torch, picking them up off the path before they wriggled away into the cracks between the paving stones.

I think I lost quite a lot of my children that evening.

So I put all the ones back that I could find and put foil over the top of the saucepan to stop them escaping.

When I woke up in the morning to go to work, at about 6.20am, I went downstairs, rubbing my weary eyes and going to the kettle to make tea. And of course there were worms everywhere! Of course there were. I wouldn't expect anything less. Impatient little things. I was ordering a home for them that day. But they just had to go running off, didn't they?!

So there I was, at 6.20am, pre-morning tea, picking worms up from off my kitchen floor. I opened the little door and looked at what had happened. They had simply been too excited to stay still and had pushed little grooves in the foil to squirm out from underneath it.

"Right! That's it! I'm getting the clingfilm out!" I told them sternly. And sure enough, over went the clingfilm. "You can't escape this."

In conversation with Danda later that day, he said, "You can't put clingfilm over! They won't be able to breathe."

Ah. Right. Ok. Sure. I see.

Panic! The shift couldn't end soon enough that day and I ran home, terrified there'd be a massacre and I'd be the one with blood on my hands. There was condensation on the clingfilm and the worms were barely moving! I tore it off and poked a few.

"Come on come on come on! Please be fine. Please be fine. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. I forgot you needed to breathe, little worms! Come on, move!" After some poking and gently squeezing to resuscitate them, they started moving again, rather sluggishly. I brought them into the kitchen under the light and waited to see if they would burrow.

They did, thank god!

I then moved them into a massive bin and clingfilmed the top but poked loads of holes into it and left them in the kitchen overnight with the light on, as that was the only guaranteed way to keep them in the soil and not trying to make a run for it.

Their home arrived the next day so they were immediately transferred into it and have been there ever since. Apparently it takes a few months for my first lot of compost to be ready and mine's not even been going a month so I've got a little wait before those naughty schoolchildren can prove to me that they've grown up to be contributing members of society.

They just chill down by the shed at the moment. I give them egg shells and vegetable peelings and they hide so I've not seen hardly any of them and am unsure if they've all died actually. But I faithfully put my vegetable peelings down there and hope for the best

:-)

P.S. I picked up the mop a few days ago to do the kitchen floor and three worms fell out!