DAY 5: Wednesday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 34 (Need to get a wriggle on.)
Money made for tinnie: $10 ($725 to go.)
Wrigs and I decided to spend the morning trying to make money for the tinnie. We knocked on every door in my street offering to do odd jobs. No one was interested. We had almost given up when we knocked on the front door of the last house in my street.
Ms Burke is the oldest person in our street, if not the world. And it turns out she also has the biggest yard.
She said she’d pay us to tidy it up. Six hours later, we walked out thirsty, sunburnt and covered in sweat and scratches.
We’d been weeding, cutting, digging and carrying in thirty-five-degree heat, and all she’d given us was ten dollars. That worked out at eighty-three and a half cents each per hour. And we were lucky to come out alive. I saw a snake, which I swear was a brown snake and, when Wrigs was pulling out some lantana plants, he got swooped by two myna birds.
Ms Burke might be the sweetest old lady in the universe but she totally ripped us off.
But all was not lost. I found a heap of worms under her mulberry tree. An excellent plan sprung to my mind. Me and Wrigs would go into the silk industry. Silk is worth a fortune, so we should have enough money to buy a tinnie in no time.
Silkworms are baby moths that haven’t become proper moths yet. Silk is their spew. They vomit it out, then wrap it around themselves to make a cocoon.
Next time you hear someone boasting about having a silk scarf, remind them they are wearing moth vomit.
To start a silkworm farm you put the worms in a box in a dark place, like Wriggler’s bedroom. You feed them mulberry leaves until they spin themselves cocoons. Cocoons are pure silk. This should take about three days.
When the worms leave the cocoons they have turned into moths, but they can’t fly away. They just flap around in the bottom of boxes until they lay eggs. Then the eggs hatch and you have a new generation of silkworms.
It’s a money-making machine. We left Ms Burke’s garden with as many silkworms as we could find and headed straight for Wriggler’s house. When we got there we covered the whole of Wriggler’s bedroom floor with old cardboard boxes from his garage. Then we filled each box with mulberry leaves and heaps of silkworms.
We might have got ripped off by Ms Burke when we tidied her yard but in a few days we would be rolling in silk.
Then me and Wrigs tried to go skimming. But both of us were so sore from clearing out the yard we couldn’t lift our arms high enough to throw a rock.