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Last week, I emptied out half of this summer's finished compost. The worms had done their work for the last few months and all that was left in the bin (besides the worms) were rich, crumbly worm castings all ready to spread among our newly planted irises. As I said, I dumped out only half of the castings, saving the other half and as many of the worms as possible to start up a new "batch" of composted castings.
What I did was this:

I've done it. I have moved my worms inside the house. There just wasn't a good place for them outside here because of, well, because of a lot of things, so inside they came. And know what? They're doing just fine. No odor. Honest! When I opened the bin to check on them the other day, there was a big wad of worms clustered around a banana peel. And boy did they squirm when the light hit them.

It's late May and, due to a postal mix-up, I just received my worm order today. They've just been introduced to the bin and are wriggling in quickly. :-)

When you first get your worms, think about the moisture in the package they were mailed in. This company sent the worms loose in a cardboard box, and boy, did it ever soak the moisture out of the worms' material! I added more water right away. Remember, they need water to breathe.

Most of the worm dealers send their worms in plastic containers or milk cartons, which keep them nice and moist.

This is terrible. My worms were supposed to arrive last week, but they never came. The post office tracker says they were forwarded somewhere else, and I have no idea why.

Imagine those poor little red wigglers, hungry and cold, packed up close together in some airless, plastic shipping container with no new kitchen scraps to munch on.

I hope I can track them down soon.

A long time ago there was a TV show called "What's My Line?" where celebrities had to guess what the guest did for a living. One time, the guest's "line" was worm farming:
Here's the episode

Cool! When you get SunChips, now you can throw the bag right into your worm farm. The bag will disappear after a couple of weeks. Read more.

People do eat worms. Not me, but some people do, I guess. I found this recipe online. Apparently, earthworms taste like dirt if you don't clean them out first before cooking.

I will not be trying this recipe, and I don't recommend it. I've read that it's an important skill to have if you're ever stranded somewhere on the planet that lacks grocery stores and good restaurants. My plan is to avoid getting into that situation in the first place.

There is at least one Dunkin' Donuts store (in Florida) that composts its coffee grounds, paper, and food waste using worms, right in the parking lot. Yeah, really! Here's more:
http://www.mothersorganics.com/about-us/081017-Dunkin-Donuts.html
I know for a fact that worms love coffee--as you may have read on this site, they seem to gravitate toward the used espresso we mix into the bin here at my house. So Dunkin Donuts isn't such a weird fit after all.
Here's a photo of the set-up.

Here's a blog post from Mental Floss magazine about some of the weirdest worms on Planet Earth. It mentions the Palouse worm, which I blogged about earlier, but oh, boy, there are some weird (and kind of gross) worms out there:
Weirdest Worms.

One of the coolest things about writing Winnie Finn was that I had to check my facts about worms with some experts. I found two guys who kindly responded to my questions about the longest earthworm ever and they are Jochen Gerber, Invertebrate Collections Manager at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and Adam Baldinger, Curatorial Associate at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Mass.