It's all about the worms

 I'm still confused as to why we are instructed to use moist newspaper, but this is what you see when we first open up the bin now, followed by worms (below) when you uncover some newspaper layers.

 A close-up of some of the worms:

 And one more:

Having the wrigglers has been a bit more work than I'd expected, I suppose mostly because I've ended up doing it all by myself rather than have Bub help out as much as he said he was going to (probably why we're going to hold off on getting a dog, too). The newspaper seems to dry out fairly quickly, but the underlayers stay moist and the worms have plumped up a lot. They seem happy. They have little colonies by the food, and they seem to congregate in the middle of the bin, for the most part staying away from the corners for some reason.

But they haven't all died, so I'm thrilled. And the bottom layer looks like rich, dark soil (I know it's worm casings, but that's what we're doing all of this for, right?) so I know they're eating and everything is going the way it's supposed to. Today I gave them a new newspaper layer and some eggshells.

What you have to understand is what I didn't post about the worms for the past two weeks: first, we'd been beset by fruit flies, who very much liked the fruit scraps the worms had gotten, and I guess newspaper doesn't cover up the smell well enough to hide it from fruit flies. But last week, I discovered a spider infestation--hundreds of tiny, red spiders all over the lid and edge of the box, along with a much larger, pregnant-looking (swollen) spider that I managed to fling out of the box that was in the top layer of newspaper. Hubby joked that next we'd have a plague of birds. But for the most part, they seem to be gone now, leaving red wriggling worms.