Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I got my first worm factory about 3 months ago. I am a Guatemalan biologist, but even though I live in the mountain area of Quiche in Guatemala and work in rural development with the local families, the apartment I rent is in a town and it does not have green areas. I was concerned because I produce one bucket of kitchen leftovers per week. I had been donating my organic bucket to someone else's compost pile, but I wanted to do recycling myself. I went into Amazon in Internet and this was my first online purchase ever. I was lucky that a person flew into my country from the United States and brought it with him. It is expensive if you want it shipped, at least for me. The Worm Factory is very simple to assemble. The booklet is very clear. I bought the worms from a man who is doing organic farming nearby and uses a huge wooden box he built himself, which is about 15 feet long, 6 feet wide and 1.5 feet tall. He is using the manure of his cows to feed the worms and he has hundreds of thousands of worms. Anyway, my worms came with a lot of cow dung but they immediately loved the box, and worked perfectly for the first month with my kitchen leftovers. I was concerned because I had not told my landlady that I would be introducing worms into my place. I did put a little sign on the worm factory that said: "Science experiment, do not touch". I did not have to worry: They are not noisy, they do not escape, and best of all, they are not smelly. I found out the worms love the vegetable leftovers from my juicer machine because those are really finely chopped. They take a lot longer to work through a banana peel. If I let the leftovers "age" about a week, they work a lot better. I was happy to see a lot of dark earth produced in a short time. I did have big trouble a few weeks later and almost gave up on the worm factory. I was going to have to make a two week trip to Houston, so on the week before leaving I tried giving them a lot of food at once, hoping they would last OK for 2 weeks without more food. The result was a total disaster! My leftovers are very wet and by over filling the tray, I created excesive humidity, which made the worms want to escape all together. The morning before leaving the country I found most of them half drowning in the lowest box, the one with the little faucet. I quickly drained the liquid and tried to restore the worms "upstairs" and balance in the tray by adding a lot of dry scraps of paper. Finally I had to give up because by then it did smell and I was thinking about liberating them in a field and beginning all over again when I came back. Thank God a co worker who had been enchanted by the worm factory told me he would take care of it. His solution was to initiate the second tray because he felt the worms were already overcrowded and all balance returned to the place. So my lesson is to look for help when I am going to be away, not to overfeed them. As I returned from Houston to Guatemala I brought with me a second worm factory because another friend wants to start his own experience at home. I find this is an excellent answer to recycling in urban areas, although women who do have green areas around their houses (we work with organic farming with families in over 30 villages) have expressed they would love to have a worm factory inside their kitchen, because it saves them the walk to the worm box they have on the field near their cows. The price is of course impossible for these families who are in most cases living with less than $2 a day per person. So, the challenge would be to find a way to make this technology accesible to these people, indoors. Meantime, the liquid from my worm factory I have donated to a papaya tree and I have seen the papayas on it grow fatter from it. The compost I will use to grow organic vegetables. Teresa Samayoa, El Quiche, Guatemala