We received our grubs from the fine folks at ProtaCulture. Here’s what it looks like:

They were nice and small which gives us time to observe the conditions of the greenhouse as the season changes. It gets pretty hot in our part of California around October, but the cool nights start to catch up. Starting the Biopod was pretty easy. The instructions say to get some old food scraps minus the meats. That’s easier said than done on a ranch with livestock. Dorothy, our pig, got to the food scraps before I could, so I had to go looking for something else. Luckily for the grubs, we had some squash rotting that came off the vine a little early. I mixed those up with a tomato that a gopher gnawed and then some discarded lettuce leaves from the aquaponics greenhouse. Since the leaves were fresh, I placed them in a black bag in the sun to break them down a little for our new grub friends.