My husband and I have started to try our hand at growing vegetables in our yard.  OK, actually it’s more like he’s growing the vegetables and I just watch.  With my brown thumb, my sorry attempt at growing a few herbs failed miserably in mass plant genocide. 

So far, my husband has successfully sprouted some tomatoes, basil and green onions and the potato-in-a-bucket looks promising as well.  Our kale was unfortunately devoured by caterpillars.
 

We’ve also decided to be more eco friendly by refraining from using pesticides and chemical fertilizers.  So over the weekend, we ended up buying our very own vericomposter. 

“What the hell is a vericomposter?” you might ask.  Well, it’s basically a worm factory.  The worms eat up our garbage and create poo that is a natural fertilizer. 
At first, I was a little hesitant about the idea of shelling out money for a box full of thousands of worms and setting it right outside my house, but I have to admit, I was simply fascinated by the sales pitch, especially when it came to the list of items the worms eat.  Besides the usual kitchen scraps, they also eat magazines, cardboard, dryer lint, paper egg cartons, vacuum dust, Kleenex, coffee filters with grounds and junk mail.  Cool!  Somehow I especially relished the idea of the worms chowing down on the endless stacks of junk mail. 

So we took home our “Worm Factory 360,” or as I like to call it, “the worm condo,” along with our starter carton of 1,000 worms.  We start the worms on floor one and as the food turns to compost, we keep building up their condominium until there are eventually four floors.  The worms are supposed to proliferate until you have something like 10,000 worms squirming around in there, eating up 5 pounds of waste and junk mail per week. 

The person who sold it to us assured us that we wouldn’t have an explosion of worms of epic proportions (which by the way, could make a nice campy horror flick).  But you never know, maybe my next business is in selling fish bait.
The worms have almost become like another set of pets.  I worry about them.  Are they moist enough?  Are they overheating?  Did I over feed them?  Will they get tired of apples and cabbage after 3 days?  I don’t know why I worry about worms that apparently can be left alone for a month on nothing but paper.

In the end, our homegrown vegetables and fertilizer are probably costing us a lot more than if we had just bought them at the store, but all you people out there laughing, just wait until the next big one hits.  We’ll not only be stocked with our own vegetables, but we’ll also have a great source of protein.  Maybe we’ll be frying the little critters up with a bit of garlic. Yum!