We got our first delivery of food scraps from the local school!  As Mark suspected, once the bulky milk cartons were separated out, the scraps were much smaller than anticipated.  Since we're working the kinks out of our system, small is good...for now.

Although we're excited to get started, we have to get an idea of how much food we'll get each week before we build the worm bin.  We had originally planned to give the initial round of food scraps to the chickens after weighing them, but learned just in time that health department policy says no food scraps from public facilities can be given to livestock.

That put us in a bit of a bind, since the only outside area that Lucy knows is off-limits is the chicken pasture (which is where we usually build our compost piles.)  Luckily, Mark's friend had found a stock tank with a hole in it at the dump a few months ago and my mom had given us a few pieces of scrap plywood.  Add on some cinderblocks and we had a dog-proof container with a handy drainage hole at the bottom. 

We laid down a layer of wood chips, dumped the food scraps on top, and topped them off with another layer of wood chips.  So far, we don't have enough data to make a real estimate, but if we continue to get the same amount of food, we'll only need a small worm bin --- roughly three feet by four feet by one foot.  I wonder if this will be big enough to get all of the benefits of mid-scale worm bins?  Would we be better off building a slightly larger bin?  Plenty to ponder before we make decisions.