A most unusual Christmas gift!!

One of my Christmas gifts came in a beautifully wrapped large, light weight box, and even after opening it I had no idea what it was!

It was pretty obvious how to assemble it, but I still didn't have a clue what it was used for!

At this point Marianne was not taking any credit for the gift, saying

'This one is all Matt'.

Ah! They know I love plants and flowers.

Is it a planter?

And then, in the bottom of the box!

And Marianne proclaims

'You are the only person we know who we could give worms to for Christmas, and they would be excited about it!'

It took a couple days for the worms to arrive.The mailman brought them to the door, instead of leaving them out in the mail box, but it was so bitter cold outside that I was worried they would have frozen to death.

The bag contained peat moss and a frozen glob of worms. Nothing moved. I misted them with water as instructed, but I was pretty sure they had not survived the trip.

They came with a guarantee, and instructions to wait 24-48 hours for them to recover from their journey through the mail.. I kept checking, and it wasn't until a full 24 hours later, when I opened the lid that I saw wiggling!

My plants and I are quite excited!! We will see how well I do with feeding my new pets!

chart from Home and Garden America

This is the description in the Uncommon Goods catalog.
Living Composter

Gardener's Gold
The happiest, healthiest plants ever—that'll be the end result of feeding food scraps to the worms in this sculptural compost container. Most worm farms look, if we're being polite, "functional." And most compost containers, in tactful terms, do not smell like roses. This one, cool-looking and odorless, raises the bar on both counts. The designers of this biomorphic worm house collected data for almost two years, then created an algorithm to figure out the best shape for both worm health and human convenience.

Drop fruit and vegetable peelings, grain foods, and tea bags into a top opening. The worms-in-residence will eat at least half of their own weight of scraps per day. The composter can "process" over two pounds of food a week, enough to keep up with most or all of the scraps in a two- or three-person household. Spread the easily removed compost next to your plants or in pots, and watch those babies grow.

Worm "castings" (a fancy word for the worm equivalent of manure) are the best natural fertilizer there is. They're packed with water-soluble plant nutrients, beneficial enzymes and microbes, and improves soil's ability to hold moisture. So potent is vermicompost that as little as a tablespoon could feed a 6" potted plant for over two months. Worms not included. Made in Taiwan.