My wife is the gardener in the family and is now the proprietess of a Worm Hotel, a British-made box you fill with worms and kitchen scraps to produce rich compost and “worm tea” (a sort of liquid compost), which we use to fertilize our flower and vegetable beds. Not only is it good for the garden but the kids love it too: a box of dirt filled with 500 worms is far more dynamic than a sleepy little ant farm. The other day, I was watching her feed kitchen scraps to the worms and realized that they’re living the good life: not only were they protected from the perils of Los Angeles that most other worms must endure (hot sidewalks, hungry finches and parrots, impromptu science experiments by kids, lawn fertilizer), but they were also eating fully ripe local strawberries and vitamin rich organic carrot peels on a regular basis. Sadly that’s better than what a lot of kids in America are eating.
—Hugh
I wish her better luck than I had with worms. I bought the “hotel” and a batch of a few thousand worms, but then the sun shifted and I adjusted some drip to sprinklers and alternately drowned and fried them to a crisp. And then, I’m embarassed to say, I bought another few thousand and did it all over again. My husband took the “hotel” away after that round . . .