One of the very best qualities of red wigglers is that they are like goats when it comes to eating. This is to your advantage especially during this time of year when you have leftover garden produce that may have gotten nipped by an early frost.
Spoiled Or Excess Garden Produce
Problem: Perhaps you have a few plants that produced much more than you had planned. Sometimes it can be hard to find people to give excess produce away to (due to location, likes/dislikes, etc). It sounds crazy, but a sad truth nonetheless.
Solution: Feed it to your worms!
Time To Clear Out The Garden
The time is fast approaching to clean out the garden and get it ready for next year. Already, we have seen snowfall in the Dakotas and freezing temperatures are sweeping across the Northwest.
Red wigglers will happily eat withered plant vines, trimmings, clippings, twigs and barks. All of that leftover plant matter is prime buffet for these little eaters.
Fallen Leaves
Another wonderful part about the Fall is fallen leaves. We all love the changing colors, piling up dead leaves and playing in them, but we don’t always enjoy the chore of bagging them up and setting them out for pickup.
Here’s a more preferable alternative: rake up the leaves and let the kids play in them to their joyful hearts’ content. When the playing is over, pile up the leaves again and wait a few months for the leaves to start decomposing. These moldy leaves make pretty decent compost that you can mix with your worm castings to give it a little more substance. Can’t beat that with a stick!
That’s not the only way you can turn your fallen dry leaves into compost. Red wigglers love eating dry leaves. They’ll gobble them right up, turning it into higher quality compost than letting the leaves pile up and mold themselves.
If you want an inside view of the miraculous circle of life, give worm composting a try. Start-up takes a little time and attention, but once you get things rolling, these trusty red wigglers come crawling to the rescue. They can turn those fallen leaves and frost-bitten produce into exceptionally high-quality compost for the next season!
Garden image courtesy of http://arizonavictorygarden.blogspot.com
