Our worm farm
Apr 14, 2003 Homeschooling
We started a worm farm for our 4H project. I lead a 4H group with my sister’s neighbor and right now every child in it (we have, let me see, 8 or 9 kids) is a cloverbud, which means that they’re not full-fledged 4Hers. Cloverbuds do a group project and the prepacked ones offered by the 4H offices looked really boring so I asked them if we could do a worm farm instead. I listed all of the ways it would meet 4H goals and she said, sure, go for it.
We set up the project, do activities to support it and document what we’ve done. We take pictures and the kids draw things and the bigger kids do some actual journaling. In August we’ll go to the county fair and present it and everyone will get a badge for participating. The kids are excited about that.
Our worm farm is in a huge, flat plastic container — a little taller than a rubbermaid sweater storage box — and up until this week they were in our basement. We drilled holes in the side and filled it with damp newspaper strips and then added the worms. We bury food in it maybe every two weeks because we don’t have a lot of worms and more would overwhelm them.
The idea with a worm farm is that it’s another way to compost food. In fact, that’s the official name for a worm farm: vermicomposting. A worm can eat about half its weight in food every week so if you have a pound of worms, that’s 1/2 pound of food that you can process. Then you use the worm castings in your garden or houseplants. The worms multiply, too, of course, creating more vermicomposting opportunity.
The kind of worms you use are known as “red wrigglers” and they’re also a popular fishing worm. At the end of our project we’ll have to decide what to do with our worm farm. It might be that the kids want to break it up so they can take a worm farm home but at least one kid was thinking maybe we could sell them.
The only problem with the worm farm, which has been pretty easy to maintain, is that it comes with a lot of fruitflies. A lot. We had a fruitfly infestation at our old apartment but I’ve never had to deal with them as early as April. We built a trap and now that the weather is warm, we moved the worms outside.
We probably wouldn’t have had any trouble if 4H hadn’t met on a couple of rainy days. Usually when it comes time to take care of the worms, I take them outside so that when the lid comes off, the fruitflies are outside. Then I add more bedding, bury some food, dig around to see what the worms are doing. But part of 4H wormfarming is dealing with the worms even if it’s too wet to take them outside, regardless of resulting fruitfly issues.
We scrubbed the kitchen down last night (Noah was an enthusiastic duster, sweeper, mopper and window cleaner. “This kitchen is filthy!” he shouted with glee, joyfully tackling another sticky spot with the mop.) but need to put bleach in the drains. And all the fruit has to start living in the ‘fridge.
Oh well, this too shall pass! Still, it’s been worth it because the kids are loving 4H and their worms.
April 14th, 2003 at 3:14 pm
That is so cool…post some pics!:)
Our science class in high school (10 grade I think) decided to experiment with fruitflies. We would place them in cold petri dishes to keep them inactive but must have let quite a few of them get warm enough because before you knew it we had an infestation…they were everywhere!
April 15th, 2003 at 12:49 am
That sounds so interesting. What a great project for kids. I have heard of vermicomposting but wasn’t exactly sure what it involved.