Worm Composter, Being the Doom-Filled Tale of a Birthday Present

So I got it in my head I wanted a worm composter, which is like a worm hotel into which you put your kitchen scraps and the hungry, industrious worms use them to produce compost (i.e. usable worm poop). Since I had a birthday approaching, I asked for a worm composter. 

And Dave made this beauty for me...

The nifty, vented lid, designed to provide air without light...

The moveable trays with screening big enough for worms to migrate from a composted level to another level with new food scraps...

To prepare the first tray, I moistened my shredder paper and some craft paper...

We added some soil, which the worms use as grit to help them digest food scraps...

Then said food scraps...

Then we ordered the worms. They arrived just as the first tray had aged two weeks, as was recommended. We added roughly two pounds of lovely, wriggly worms and their shipping dirt to the first tray. We set the composter in a darkish, coolish area of our garage and wished the worms well.

Then summer arrived.

Did I mention the composter environment isn't supposed to get warmer than 80 F? And that when summer arrives in San Antonio, it does so with long days topping 90 degrees?

A short scene:

Interior, garage. Shan looks at floor around worm composter.

Shan (puzzled): Look.

Dave: What the--?

Shan: WORMS!

I'll spare you photos of the hundreds of curly, desiccated worms caught, much like the doomed of Pompeii, in the moments when their attempted escape turned to agonizing death.

We found a few survivors and deposited them in a pile of garden soil we're slowing using. But what to do with the composter? It was too pretty to toss out.

So Dave had the brilliant idea to use it to grow potatoes. As the plant grows, you're supposed to heap soil or mulch around the stem, giving the plant plenty of space to produce tubers. Using the composter, we would remove the screening from the upper trays and set them on, one by one, as the plant needs more soil. So we set up a plant to test it...

And Dave made two awesome tumbling composters and bolted them to our garage. See the bar through the center that they spin on? That makes for some fun, let me tell ya...