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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Yes, the garage – where I moved the compost bin. Spoiler alert?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Whatever substance was in there was definitely not compost. It was swampy<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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?”<\/p>\n “Huh?” we said.<\/p>\n It turned out that we were dumping our catastrophe into his<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n “Does it really matter?” we asked.<\/p>\n “Just doesn’t seem very neighborly to me,” he said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading