Repulsive

Last year, we bought a wormery for helping with composting our household waste, so we could use it on the garden. We’d already got one big compost bin, but the wormery was also supposed to be able to deal with food scraps and so on, which you’re not supposed to put on a normal compost heap.

Over the last six months or so, we’ve been using it a lot – but obviously not properly. I’m not sure how so much water got in (possibly rain, but I’m not certain) but it obviously managed to drown/kill all the worms, and so the entire thing was just a festering pile of scum.

We cleaned it out this weekend – I’d been considering taking photos of “how not to do it”, but once the covers came off, in all honesty I just wanted to get the entire lot into black bags, and dispose of it all as quickly as possible. Photos would’ve taken too long.

The first layer was OK, just lots of mould, fur, and standard stuff. The second one, bluntly, stank. It was gross. Flies all over the place (luckily we’d been prepared, and had bought stuff like fly spray already – we’d opened it last weekend, so we knew what it was going to be like) and the smell was just unbelievable. Truly, truly manky.

The third layer didn’t smell as bad, but seemed to be entirely populated by worm corpses and maggot larvae.

So all in all, it was a bit of a disaster. We’ve got rid of it all – and I pity the poor fucker who opens those binbags, I tell you – and will start again from scratch once the new pack arrives. Only time will tell how we do this time…