Vision

Our vision was to learn about what constitutes good soil and to create it naturally by composting food waste from our school lunches into rich worm castings that we could use to grow flowers and herbs from seed and use to grow native perennial flowers for our pollinator garden.

Action

We used the generous grant from LSF to buy red wigglers, a vermi-composter, and coconut coir bedding to start. We succeeded in researching all there was to know about earthworms and vermi-composting and first educated our kinder buddies by letting them handle our red wigglers and feed them. Soon, the word spread and other classes started dropping off their veggie and fruit scraps to put in the food bin. We would mush it up with the mini food processor and feed the worms first once a week, then twice a week as their appetite and numbers increased. We had to put more layers on our composter and buy more coconut coir and more worms, and soon we were harvesting the worm castings for our flowers and herbs.

Reflection & Celebration

On reflection, it was a very successful project. Other students from other grades participated with daily gifts of food waste, and they enjoyed our school presentation about worm habitats, biology, socialization and, of course, vermi-composting. Our parent community was very pleased with our results and now want to delve into vermi-composting as well! We will be celebrating our success at a school funfair in June with our own booth on vermi-composting so we can reach all the parents. Thank you again to LSF for making this all possible with your generous grant. It was so good to see the students totally engaged and enthusiastic, and they felt so positive about the future of their world and how they could make a difference, small yet powerful!