I’m in the panhandle and we’re lucky to have hit our average for water — it’s dry, but it’s always dry here, not the extreme drought of downstate Texas. That said, I beat the heat by hanging shade cloths from the house to the fence when we do hit the 100s, and the house itself creates full shade in the late afternoon. The flower portion of the garden is a drought-tolerent bee garden that takes care of itself, and the stuff in the blue boxes is long dead now thanks to hail and bad luck. I’ve also been experimenting with some large homemade self-watering tubs. They used surprising little water, so if I do more container gardening in the the future I’ll be making more use of them. One thing I could do to improve water retention is to mulch the garden soil, but I purposely leave it bare for ground-nesting bees.

As for the worm bin, I don’t put a lid on it. The bin has a large holes drilled into its sides and bottom and it sits on top of a couple of bricks. A larger cardboard box with the top and bottom cut off surrounds the plastic bin (for extra shade) allowing about six inches of air space between the box and bin. I have a large leftover plastic lid partially covering the top of the cardboard box for airflow (but mostly to keep rain and hail out). Also, I cut some large cardboard pieces to lay in the bin on top of the bedding with about an inch outermost border of bedding that isn’t covered at all — this seems to keep the bedding moist to the top of the bin, as opposed to the dry inch or two layer of newspaper and cardboard shreddings I struggled with before, and the worms now come to the top of the bedding. I can remove a piece of cardboard to feed a portion of the bin while leaving the rest of the bin covered.

I don’t use any other methods to keep the bin cool and I rarely have to add water — the food scraps, currently melon rinds, lettuce, ground eggshells, and coffee grounds, provide all the extra moisture for the bin. I might have drilled too many holes in the plastic bin, so there may be too much airflow (which might be why there’s no sludge at the bottom of the bin), but the worms seem fine with the arrangement so far!