So I’ve been keeping a worm bin (a compost bin that uses worms to turn food scraps into fertilizer) for about two years now. For the first year or so, I kept the bin in the garage, but that made it too easy to ignore; the food scraps would pile up in the bag in the corner of our kitchen and start to smell, and the worms would tunnel sadly for weeks through their own poop, hoping against hope for a delivery of broccoli stems and wilted chard. Mold would grow. Sprouts would become seedlings and then die from lack of sunlight. So I moved the bin indoors, which led to much better care of the worms and somewhat better care of my plants, too, since I was harvesting the castings more often. But it also led to a pretty harrowing fruit fly problem. So back down to the garage it went.
The city of Long Beach – or, at least, our block – has a giant cockroach problem, by which I mean that both the problem and the cockroaches are giant. A few months ago I caught our cat sniffing and pawing the wall of our living room; I thought he was communing with ghosties and laughed it off, but after the roaches started getting into the apartment, I realized that he was probably hearing and smelling them in the walls. For awhile, my husband and I would come out each morning to find roach parts lying here and there on the carpet, along with the occasional pile of cat puke. The exterminator said they were probably coming in from outside the building. We would see them crawling around on the wall of the garage when we came home from work.
Yes, the garage – where I moved the compost bin. Spoiler alert?
After I moved it back down, I promptly went back to my old habits. It wasn’t until I noticed that my jasmine buds were dying before they bloomed that I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fertilized it. I hurried to the garage, held the bin close to my body as I maneuvered it around the car, and opened it in the shade of the garage door.
Whatever substance was in there was definitely not compost. It was swampy. It smelled like a ripe sewer. The worst part, though, were the three-inch-long cherry red cockroaches that covered the surface of it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way they looked as they crawled on top of each other and scurried around the sides of the bin.
My husband heard me scream and came down. We moved it to the sun and kicked it a couple of times, but most of the roaches stayed. To make a long story short, we decided that the worm bin was kaput and the least terrible course of action was to just dump its contents in the garbage. If we’d been thinking more clearly, we would have tried to get it in a bag first; as it was, though, I was panicked and on the verge of dry heaving, so we each grabbed a handle, ran it to the dumpsters, and did our best to pour it in. There were a few worm survivors at the bottom. We paused while I tried to think of a way to save them, but putting them in one of the dusty planters would probably kill them, and keeping the compost bin would only invite more cockroaches. We dumped them. Situations like this are why I observe Yom Kippur.
While we were dealing with this, a guy from next door came out of his gate and sat silently on his bike, not quite staring at us, but making it clear that he was interested. Finally he said, “Not very neighborly, is it?”
“Huh?” we said.
It turned out that we were dumping our catastrophe into his building’s trash can. Or, rather, it had our address written on it, but it was a wee bit closer to his building than it was to ours, so obviously it was his.
“Does it really matter?” we asked.
“Just doesn’t seem very neighborly to me,” he said.
We had to apologize twice, and then remind him that we’d apologized twice, to get him to go away. What I felt genuinely terrible about later, aside from the worms, was dumping without a bag.
I still have a couple of unanswered questions about the whole fiasco. First off, my neglect of the worms wasn’t any worse than it had been in the past. What went wrong this time? Secondly, worm bins are designed to keep out larger animals. How did the giant roaches get in? I have some theories, but honestly, I’m still too revolted to start researching. In any case, we’re moving in a month, so the worm bin is on hiatus until we get settled in our new place – which, according to the UCLA student housing office, will have a balcony.
How are your DIY urban homestead endeavors going? Consider this a place to gripe, whine, and vent about those veggies that are dying, that bread that isn’t rising, and other projects that have gone awry.
Julie, that was hilarious.
Oh my hell, that sounds so similar to our composting experiences, only worse. I think my favorite part is the death swarm of fruit flies that takes over the kitchen every year – especially when they rise in a cloud every time you use the kitchen sink. It’s “The Birds” writ very, very small.
Oh no, that’s just awful. I would have passed out, I’m sure. I’ve got the crawlies just thinking about it.
I always had a composter at my houses growing up, but we were in the suburbs with a backyard for the compost and never had trouble with anything going swampy. The occasional fruit fly menace if we left the little compost bucket under the sink uncovered too long, but dumping the bucket and keeping the counters clean for a few days always took care of it.
However, I’m moving out to a city apartment soon, and I’ll have to do something different if I want to compost at all. My sister managed, but she lived in a very big city on the west coast that leaned green, and was able to put things in public composters. My new building in a mid-size prairie city doesn’t even have recycling yet (apparently this is forthcoming – yay!). There is a balcony though, although the winters will be -40C and lower, so I don’t think anything will be composting at that temperature. No roaches either, though.
eep!
I am eternally grateful that a) my city has a municipal composting program and b) we do not get 3″ cockroaches here. (Because when a couple of small non-cockroach roaches flew in through my apartment’s open window – and were immediately caught and disposed of – I think I came very close to a panic attack.)
However, my sad pots of balcony plants need a little something, that’s for sure. I should be glad that my balcony is full-sun – that’s pretty rare! – but it’s so full-sun that I think my plants are baking. And I bet they’d like some compost beyond just my coffee grounds (though they do seem to like those).
Oh, worms.
Mine are unhappy. I moved in May and put them on the front porch, which is covered, then we had to move things off the porch for a sort of inspection thing– no private property in common areas– and so they went to the back balcony, which is covered enough for light rain but not for heavy.
Then we got a lot of downpours. My worm bin is growing algae. I am going to take it to friends until I know where, or if, it’ll go in the new apartment.
One of the ways I can think of that the cockroaches might have got in is that the eggs could have come in on something, and another is that after hatching, cockroaches are small. Then they grow, shed their skin and are a bit bigger, and they grow a bit more, shed their skin again, and are a bit bigger, maturing a bit each time. One or more could have come in when they were small.
As for why your compost went so gross, composting is a fairly complex set of chemical reactions and biological events, and if the temperature, moisture, acidity, or anything else was a little bit different it could have set it off on completely the wrong direction. Maybe different foods went into it. If a different bacteria got in, or one of the good bacteria either died out or over-grew then this would prevent the composting process from occurring properly. Even my super-duper “how to grow ALL your own food and be 100% self-sufficient” book says that sometimes, composting just goes wrong…. Mine never works properly, actually, but at least it’s too cold for those kind of cockroaches! and thus, since we don’t have them here, I unfortunately don’t know much more about them, or what might have attracted them and caused them to REALLY LIKE your compost bin.
What a creepy composting story!
Funny story.
I know nothing about worm composting, other than reading about it. I bake my compost in a large pile, and keep it densely-covered with straw.
I modeled my pile after a system used by Joe Jenkins, who safely composts human manure in a pile hot enough from natural bacterial action that it destroys all human pathogens within 24 hours. I’ve used different kinds of manure in my pile, including horse, chicken and cow manure, and also butchering by-products (guts and whatnot). Keeps it running hot, above 125°F.
I keep three piles running at any given time. One pile I’m adding to as we need to, one I’m letting sit for a year so the macroorganisms can do their thing, and one I’m pulling absolutely beautiful cured compost from, to use in potting and in the garden. I never have to turn my piles, but they produce the best compost I ever saw.
I’m too far north for cockroaches, but I think they wouldn’t be a problem if the pile runs hot and then sits after the thermophilic bacteria are done with it. I do have to ward them against some critter which likes to dig in them, but chickenwire works fine for that.
I once had a cockroach unexpectedly run across my bare foot while I was visiting a friend down south. Turns out a shoe is an excellent and lethal response, and darn near instinctive. So I sympathize with your panic response.
However, I also sympathize with your neighbor. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t care whose trash bin it was; I’d just care about proximity to my own dwelling, since red three-inch cockroaches probably don’t respect property boundaries, and probably go looking for the nearest good thing.
A friend of mine who gathers kitchen compost and dumps it every few days keeps it covered with a thin, weighted cloth. The weave is too fine to allow fruit flies in, but oxygen gets in just fine, so it doesn’t go aerobic on her. That could probably be made to work with a worm bin.
Of course, no matter what you do, you have to check in often enough to keep the system in balance. Good luck on the next attempt!
Grace
For my birthday a couple of years back, my husband gave me a worm farm.
It was great because at the time, I had a little kitchen garden and was getting into the urban homesteader thing.
I had some problems with fruit flies and only a couple of cockroaches, but once I got the hang of how much my little wormies would eat, I stopped having problems.
Then, because the owners of the house we were renting decided to sell, we were forced to move. We had a little garden in the new place, but I was busy growing something else, namely a fetus. It was winter then, so the worms were pretty dormant, though I occasionally threw them a bit of kitchen scrap, a few celery tops here, some uneaten lettuce there, some potato peels once in a while. Then when spring arrived, the baby came with it and I became thoroughly occupied with tending to the needs of one particular wriggling pink thing, rather than the multitude wriggling in their plastic apartment.
My mother had tried to warn me about houseplants dying when the baby comes along and I had said, “Well it’s a good thing I don’t have any!” But I gave no thought to my worms.
After the first major heat wave, I went out to my bin with a handful of wilted salad, to find its contents completely dry and lifeless. My worms were dead.
I felt terrible, since I’d been so happy to get them. But they were an inevitable casualty of new-motherhood.