That Darn Squirrel

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but there is a VERY unwelcome visitor in my gardens!! It has utterly destroyed my sunflowers and digs ditches in every single container I have. I'm also fairly sure it ate the last of my strawberries before the heat stressed my plants out and they stopped producing anything, even runners.
I'm not the first to complain about them, and the myriad number of suggestions on the internet for driving them away are just boggling.
There wasn't any money for a system that shot pellets at them. I didn't want to put up a sonic alarm because it might disturb my own pets. And programming a water gun using Python to shoot them when they showed up seemed awesome and geeky, but I just don't have the time or appropriate equipment to get it done.
So I resorted to chemical warfare.
After every rain, which sadly but perhaps conveniently for my memory and schedule has been VERY infrequent, I run out and sprinkle cayenne in the pot of every single plant I have. And it has worked! When I only did the lower plants and forgot the plants on my upper deck, I saw the little bastard bypass everything there and scale my deck posts to get upstairs. As soon as I sprinkled it up there... boom, he left that alone and paced back and forth along the cement brick retainer wall that pretends it is my back yard.
I just have to stay on top of it to make sure he leaves things alone, as I just got a SECOND sprout on my ginger and my pumpkin is finally flowering like crazy (I shall have to run outside and do some artificial insemination to see anything by Halloween at this point. Bees are disturbingly few and far between.)
I was upset and sad that he came and ate the flowers off of all the sunflowers I'd grown from seed, the ones that my daughter had helped me plant in the spring with such happy abandon, when Nature did that awesome thing she always does.
She showed me I was pretty stupid in thinking she just gave up that easily.
My sunflowers are atrocious and would win no awards, but currently they have new growth sticking out of the top of the stems that were chewed down to nothing and the leaves stripped. And in the middle of all of that.... a single flower perked open as if to say... "F*** YOU SCIUROMORPH!!"
I am going to protect that tiny flower, and any of its brethren that show up, with my life. And the cayenne wars will continue, because I want this bastard OUT OF MY LIFE.

NATURE FINDS A WAY. UP YOURS, SQUIRREL!

Fodder for Worms

So it turned out I needed to break out the second tray for the worm bin sooner than I thought, and it turned out to be a better learning experience than the first tray.
A warning, this will be pretty image intensive, as I documented everything this time in an attempt to give people an idea of what goes in to working a worm bin.
After I had loaded up the first bin with a ton of corn husks and other things that apparently take a great deal of time to break down, it became very obvious that the worms weren't going through the stuff in the trays as fast as I thought they would. This is probably because I bought less than they recommended and they hadn't had a chance to ramp up reproduction just yet, despite the plethora of food they were being given.
SO... I decided to start a second tray because I had a scraps bucket brimming to full and a pile of cardboard and newspapers ready to go and taking up space in my small-ish kitchen. I figured the worms could travel back and forth between the two trays through whatever looked yummier to them. Or tasted, since it's pitch black and they like it that way.

As you can see, it was pretty darn crowded in that first tray.

I began with the recommendation to create the food and roughage mix for the worms out of the stuff they included; the rest of the paper shreds (I tore up the paper bag they came in, too, because hey the entire point of this is not to waste resources!), the pumice, and the rest of the coconut coir, which I realized I had only used perhaps 1/4 of instead of half and probably explained why the worms were having a rough time in the first tray... not enough stuff to get a footing in.
Everything thrown together in a bowl...

This is me adding "worm minerals" on top of everything to give them some extra nutrition. I prefer gummy vitamins.

Then wet everything down and stirred it with the handy pitch fork they included.

Mmmm....

I then went about shredding the mail, the egg cartons, the extra newspapers and everything else available and tossed it in the bottom of the second tray I was prepping.

I then walked it outside and set it on top of the first tray, adding the coconut coir/paper/pumice/worm minerals mix over top of it in a surprisingly thick layer. They say this tray, being second, didn't need newspaper on the bottom of it because the worms would want to crawl up in to it so... I figured that was enough prep of the base!

Thankfully it just looks like dirt that survived a music festival.

I tossed in my scrap bin stuff to give them the "greens" that were needed to make proper compost , and to give the worms something interesting to actually find once they journeyed upwards.
Point of note here - "Greens" are plants, fruits, vegetables, loose tea, coffee grounds, anything that is wet and organic in nature. "Browns" are things like newspaper, junk mail, cartons, cardboard, anything that has been processed and is flat or "dead", if you will. It provides the proper balance of nitrogen and carbon within the wormy environment.

Yum yum yummy..... for them, anyway!

I then layered wet newspaper on top of everything per the recommendations to keep down fruit flies and pests and to help keep the environment nice and most. Plus it helps keep the inside of the lid clean.

The county newspaper - where I find out about deals on groceries from last week once it gets to me.

And voila! Finished! And seriously easy. I was able to do it with a toddler underfoot and a husband milling around trying to figure out what on earth I was doing with perfectly good mixing bowls.

Capped off smartly for that warm, dark environment your worms love!

I have noticed that within a week of putting the second tray over top of the first that the VERY full first tray dropped down at least an inch in height. A check of the contests -which I have spared you a picture of- shows everything as being wilted and a LOT more dark matter in the bottom than previously. I didn't stick my hand in it because I had a toddler there watching me and did not wish to have an emulatable moment, But it seemed to me giving them the extra space to move around actually made the digesting go faster. I call that a win!
And a fun side bit that I found out after this: I was telling my Dad about venturing in to vermiculture during our weekly phone call. He grew up on a farm, so everything that I talk about doing is stuff he has already done, including ringing the neck off a chicken when he was 6. HARD CORE.
When I explained to him that I had red wrigglers in my garage, he grew excited and told me about how HIS father used to have a huge compost pile that he raised worms in, just a pile of leaves and food scraps and whatnot in the middle of a pit made from cinder blocks. Nothing NEARLY so fancy as the small contraption I dumped money in to. But what he did was go through and not only sell the worm castings, but he also sold the worms themselves to an outfit that sold fishing bait out of vending machines all over the South. Apparently it made him a LOT of money.
"But I bet you've never seen one of those. They wouldn't be down where you live," he said softly.
"Actually, there's one right outside the car wash about a half mile from here," I told him, laughing.
It was an odd thing to learn about family history over, and do a bit of bonding with, but it was definitely cool to learn about. And also kind of funny to find out that I'm not doing anything new right now, and that this sort of thing is apparently in my DNA!
Anyway, I'm hoping this helped some folks out in getting an idea of what it takes to set up and maintain a worm bin, and I'll update again when we go to harvest the worm castings from the first bin!

~An end note; I negotiated to borrow my husband's travel laptop and will be using it write updates going forward. Thank you to everybody for your patience!