silly little projects for the end times
vermiculture for the collapse of civilization garden
This week I prepared a cute home for a bag of worms. I await their arrival, concerned that they may not have survived the trip after being on a truck all day underneath the Hell Dome, I ready a spray bottle to spritz them with cool water. They will live in a double stack of storage totes, one peppered with drainage holes and a multiple screened portholes, half full of damp, shredded cardboard, and a bit of grit.
Feeling helpless in the face of all the collapse lately, but maybe this is a way to push against it. This is not to shift responsibility from the real guilty parties. For all the garbage we separate, bags and containers we re-use, percentages of post-consumer waste in our disposable things, biodegradable cleaning products, and other decisions we make when choosing our household products, there’s always the oil spill or chemical release in a waterway, exploding tank farms, forests razed for tar sands or cattle ranches, a reactionary politician overturning a local plastic bag ban, a Superfund site, and so many little fracking earthquakes, sinkholes, and flammable water.
We can still do some simple things that may benefit our households, communities, and ecological biomes while we figure out what we can do to make this wrecked earth as livable as possible. I mean, maybe we can? No idea.
There are worm bin systems that are super easy to make for people who are are handy with a drill, and as long as they have good airflow, mild temperatures, some sort of bedding, and whatever is in the produce drawer they will do fine. Food service workers and the people they love can make a great system out of 2 or 3 nesting industrial-sized square mayonnaise or round pickle buckets. Feed the little guys coffee grounds plus filters, tea bags, apple cores, plant-based scraps, maybe minimal onions and citrus but most other produce is fine, and biodegradable shredded paper and cardboard. Worms turn all that garbage into a nice top-dressing for your houseplants, guerrilla gardens, and window tomatoes. It is one of the easiest garden projects — the hardest part is waiting for the worms to show up.
When my kids were little I pretended to name all the worms — “this is Wendy, this is Walter, this is Sabrina, this is Tony …” and really thought they knew I was joking but there was a very long pause where they looked like they were not so sure. Hundreds of worms swarming an apple core, “Frederick and Charlene and Murphy and Pierre … and oh you’re new! Do you like the name Fergus? Look for Bianca, she’ll show you around.”
It’s perfectly reasonable for them to have considered that maybe I snapped and named a bunch of worms and thought I could tell them apart. I was under a lot of stress and maybe making up little stories about my worm metropolis eased it a bit. Maybe I’m looking for that sort of relief again.
That first megalopolis of red wigglers died in The Great Valentine’s Week Blackout and Sub-Zero Polar Vortex of 2021 (Winter Storm Uri), even the ones in the pop-up greenhouse. For several years I fed them coffee grounds, tea bags, paper, and odds and ends from the produce drawer and in return they made my plants grow strong and healthy. And after they died in the freeze I dumped all the frozen seedlings into the worm bin, said a little prayer, and turned them into the compost pile.
Today, finally, after an appropriate period of grieving, it is time to start over. I drilled holes into a tote again, and made portholes with mesh screens all around the top so there’s airflow without the danger of adventurous worms falling out and getting eaten by a bird, and to keep insects from taking over everything in the bin.
So, now all that’s left is to refresh the tracking on UPS all day until they show up.
It is a million degrees and they are tiny living things, why did I do this?
They’ll show up looking like tiny strips of bacon!
It’s almost 7pm. I napped, listened to an ambient thunderstorm playlist, tore up cardboard for several silly little garden projects. I’m feelin’ queasy, saying nice things to the cats because the poor lil’ guys need attention, watching garden mycology videos, the SAG-AFTRA press conference, disaster news, more naps, writing, refreshing the tracking …
… this is how I imagine life before Godzilla steps on the house or whatever disaster strikes. Just livin’ life, trying to find some purpose, figure out one’s place in the world, maybe sit and write a to-do list, take medication, tear up cardboard for the worm farm and then, a billionaire figures out how to buy a bunch of nukes, has one bad day, and doesn’t even bother counting down. We don’t get to settle our bets on what would ultimately destroy us — “whoever guessed fussy rich person with too much power is the winner!” we will all think for the last time, “What a surprise.” My last thought will be “I guessed Godzilla, oops, oh well!” and nobody wins the pool.
All the time spent worrying just to have it go off in a fit of pique like we hit multiball, every bumper is a potential end of the world, and then someone orders the building bulldozed in the middle of the game. The anxiety that with no pollinators we starve, turtles choke on plastic, bills are high, Canada’s on fire, some Marie Antoinette with a yacht wants me to pay my student loan — all this time we could have been eating cake. The practice of burning several varieties of carbon many ways constantly because some asshole bought shitty farmland that weeps oil, turning what should have been left in the ground into a gross religious fetish moneymaker that will kill us all while we cry that we can’t live without it — do I have the energy for this? Oceans swallow coastlines. I just made a healthy smoothie while knitting my brow over it. I have long covid like so many people, and around the world, we compare notes on broken social media platforms and wonder if we’ll recover or die watching the sixth mass extinction event, every new article about our condition is bleak as shit, but still we might actually outlive civilization?! This is a lot to absorb.
Easier to go outside and let the sun do its worst. I shoveled compost into some grow bags yesterday. It was evening, but still like walking on the sun. I melted fast. Yes, yes, pacing, shut up — but what if this is the last decent garden I can make — what if climate change, societal weirdness, chronic illness, eviction, or death makes this the last one?
Checked tracking … this is the stupid time of day where my eyes are tired and I have to close one to focus. Drunk vision without alcohol. Maintaining clarity is so much effort now, it is frustrating to have so few good hours in a day.
I feel pretty stupid for ordering worms during hell dome times. I hope the delivery driver is okay.
Okay, happy now, the worms are alive and healthy. The delivery person got the box o’ worms mixed up with my across the street neighbor’s book, and the worm box said “Let’s Get Dirty!” so I’m glad I caught this before they did.