Yes, it is hard to make a salad for one person like I said in my last post. On a not-so-infrequent basis, I'll discover the crisper in the refrigerator full of wilted cilantro and old, ugly lettuce. I could throw this away, but how much more fun would it be to make it in to a tasty soup for a bin full of worms?

I went down to my local worm store and picked up a bag of red worms last summer. Here are some other worm suppliers in San Diego, but many garden stores have them. I read a little about it before I went which made the whole process much more complicated than it should be. I was really worried about killing the worms like I tend to do with plants... turns out these are some hearty little guys. You can feed them too much or not enough, leave them outside in the heat and cold, dig around in their soil, and pretty much torture them in every way possible and they just keep on loving you! Don't get me wrong, I'm not a jerk to them. I'm just not always as sensitive as maybe I should be. My plants hate me for this, but my worms love me.

So get any sort of bin or pot and fill it about a foot deep with soil. Dump in a bag of worms and cover the bin with a board. That's it! Okay, you might want to make sure your bin has some circulation, maybe a few small holes in the bottom, but I think they might still do okay without that. Also, don't make the soil much deeper than a foot or the soil will compact at the bottom. The looser soil is easier to mix the food in too. Here's how you feed worms...

Save up your food scraps in a Tupperware. Worms can eat anything that is biodegradable, but stay away from fatty or oily things that might start stinking before the worms can eat them.

Move some soil out of the way in the worm bin.

This is the fun part because you get to play with the worms! They don't like it so much though... pretty much like to mind their own business.

Pour it the worms soup. It's red now... I think I threw in some beet scraps.

Mix the dirt with the soup so that the worms don't drowned in the liquid. Smooth out the dirt, cover the bin so the birds and other animals don't get in, and you're done!

A great thing about composting with worms is that it doesn't create any oder, so you can even do it indoors like I did last winter. And when the worms are done eating, you can use it as fertilizer or potting soil for your plants. You can even feel good about not putting food in the trash. But still the best reason to do it is because worms are fun! Maybe when I have a restaurant I can put a huge worm bin in the back.