Big Green Cones

We got these things from the City of Seattle a few years ago. Marvelous things. You put food scraps into them (vegetables, eggshells, bread, coffee, no meat) and worms happen. There's only one problem. Getting the compost goodness out of the green cone and into the rest of the garden.

To keep the rats out, the green cone is dug pretty well into the ground, so it takes a fair amount of work to undig it. And then there's the fact that you're dealing with worm casting. In tha annals of excreta it's not that bad -- the come itself doesn't smell at all -- but once one is digging it up it is quite apparent that the castings came out of something's rear end.

Now, we've had two cones for a few years now, and we haven't really felt the need to dig them up. That is, after pouring a goodly amount of food into these things, the things had never, ever filled up. Where had the stuff gone?

It's clear that the process of going through a worm had compacted everything *a lot*, but a couple of years on one cone? It became apparent that worms were in fact carrying the stuff into the surrounding soil. Hence my current solution: part the thing in the middle of a large garden spot, and don't do anything. Just keep on dumping food into it and let whatever transport mechanisms are working do the rest.

I just put the cone there a few months ago; we'll see how thing works. One probable potential problem is that there will be a pretty steep gradient of nutrients from the cone.