Failure Part 2: Mystery Strings

I don't know if anyone's guessed yet what my second big mistake with respect to the cashew cheese ingredients was, but when I opened up our worm compost bin a couple of mornings ago to take a look at our voracious roommates, I also didn't yet know what my mistake had been.

But this is the sight that greeted me (and keep in mind that the last thing we'd put in our bin was a usual mix of vegetable cores, fruit peels, and newspaper more than a week ago):

Now, I don't know how familiar you all are with what a compost bin usually looks like, but let's just say it's usually very dark brown, with lots of wet-looking mostly-decomposed food, soil, and pink worms. Not mounds of long yellow stringy things.

So what could these be?! When I first discovered this, we had friends soon coming over for breakfast, so I had to ignore the problem for the time being. When I returned the next day, I pulled out one of these yellow string things to find this:

Can you tell what it is?!

It's a sprouted wheatberry!

You remember those wheatberries I'd thrown in after my failed cashew cheese attempt? Well, they'd taken root in our fertile and lush compost and had sprouted in the dark and damp worm bin conditions, pulling up all the nutrients from the compost and crowding our poor little worms. I spent the better part of the morning pulling out these shoots, cutting them up, and mixing them back in with newspaper in a new layer of the compost bin (I assume they won't just take root again...) Even as it was kind of a pain, it was also really cool to realize how much growth potential our compost has and to think about these grains we eat as breathing seeds capable of regeneration.

Now I just can't wait for spring and the ability to use this compost in our very own garden!