Growing Worms

Have you seen it? There is something new in the third-grade garden—a worm farm for making compost! Sunflower Sentry Garden received a generous grant from Zero Waste Marin to build a system that includes six wooden stands and environment bags, thousands of worms and a large blue canopy to protect the wigglies from weather extremes and rain.

My Nutrition-Science students set-up six worm home environments. They filled the large canvas bags with moistened cardboard, shredded newspapers and compost for the bedding. Several kids whipped up a tasty batch of worm stew (compost mixed with organic food scraps supplied by Chef Guillaume) and spread it on top. Lots of little hands carefully moved the worms to their new homes and covered them with a cardboard top to keep things dark and moist. And no, you won’t find worm stew on the chef’s lunch menu.

The stands were a favorite with the kids that pretended they were telaporters.

Shredding newpapers was great fun and very messy.

Worm stew will keep our wigglies strong, healthy and happily making compost.

Gently lowering the bag of worms down to their new home.

“What are they doing?” “Are they moving?” “Look, there is a huge clump of worms over there!”

All of the bags have zipped netting tops for best air circulation.

Perfect worm environments–and they come in different colors–red, green and purple.