Worms surviving the Boulder winter
I have an outdoor worm bin, and I did some things to prepare it for the winter. However, here in Boulder, we have had a pretty bad cold snap.
Here’s some weather data from the Weather Underground site for January of 2010:
You can see that we had a prolonged stretch of freezing winter. In fact, a few days ago, I went out to add some food to my worm bin, and the first whack with my post hole diggers showed that it was frozen. My worm bin is black, but it probably gets 1-2 hours of sun a day. That’s not great for winter (though it does help preserve moisture during the summer).
I dealt with this frozen worm bin a few ways:
- I added some food to the top. I had removed enough material in the fall (putting it into my garden) that I was able to just add material to the top. I made sure to cover the top with leaves and other carbon sources, and add some water (in the form of snow) to alleviate any smell.
- I froze some food. This is a fairly common wormkeeping practice, though I had never done it before. It keeps food smells down while you are storing it, and the freeze/thaw process helps break down the food faster. However, I still prefer my food scraps bucket.
- I threw some worm food away. I confess I did this in the deeps of the freeze, when I felt saving any more food would overwhelm my worm bin when I was finally able to add more food.
I have also added worms to a dirt bed in my patio area. I dug it up just a few days ago and was quite happy to see some redworms happily eating some food scraps I’d added a while ago. So, at least some of my population of worms survived the Boulder deep freeze of 2009-2010.
Add comment January 23rd, 2010
