[Chirimoya]

I have a confession to make. My husband has other women. Hundreds of them, living in a trough at the bottom of the garden. This attempted joke works better in Spanish, where the word for worms - lombrices - is feminine.

Only those who have met worm-culture enthusiasts will know what I mean with these allusions to an errant husband. Forget football, golf and the usual suspects. The worms fire them with enthusiam bordering on indecent passion, it has them frisking out to the garden in the early hours of the morning to check on their 'girls', and you only have to see the look on their faces when describing their harem to unsuspecting strangers.

We first heard about this method through a friend, and then by coincidence found out that a cousin of my husband's has a worm farm near Villa Mella. Mr Chiri went to visit his cousin one day, and came back with a handful of the floozies, and thus began the love affair.

We set up two troughs, one here in the city and another at my mother-in-law's in the campo. What you do is make a bed for the hussies using earth and dry leaves, and drill some holes round the sides and base (we used the inside shell of an old fridge) for ventilation and drainage. Time to set the jezebels free. All you need to do to satisfy their needs is to give them decomposing organic household waste and sprinkle some water over them a couple of times a day. Such a far cry from a demanding wife, so who could blame him?

The delicate little temptresses need to be housed away from sunlight, and the trough needs to be covered but not sealed.

They produce 'humus' which is the best organic fertiliser in the universe as we know it. No artificially synthesised product comes anywhere near to producing the same results.

These brazen strumpets consume vast amounts of the aforementioned household organic waste. I have a small bucket in the kitchen into which all food waste and some paper goes. We now generate about a third as much rubbish as before the little ladies came to stay. I used to have to take out the bin every day whether it was full or not, because of the smell of the organic waste in the heat. These days we empty the organic bucket into the trough about once a day and the rest of the rubbish goes out every third or fourth day.

This is also healthier in that the kitchen and outside bins no longer seem to attract insects or rodents, as the refuse consists of plastics, metals and some glass (although we recycle most glass via a 'botellero'). I have definitely had fewer or no sightings of mice, rats or cockroaches since the seductresses came to stay, inside or outside the house. The ant problem has also been reduced significantly.

The whole worm culture set up is inexpensive and easy to manage. There is sometimes a slight 'farm smell' but nothing too pungent or offensive. So far none of the sirens has escaped so no danger of them terrorising the neighbourhood.

This is something that can be installed on a small, large or medium scale. It works for a household - we use the humus in the garden. It has more potential for a small holding or at community level, and at a larger scale can be commercialised.

Chiri