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WEEK of MAY 10, 2004
@BFS! archives

Compost Happens:
Life in the Worm Bin

by Jeffrey Stanley

“We had a teacher who knew nothing, a parent who knew nothing, but we became worm crazy. It shows how a parent can really influence your work,” says Preschool 4s teacher Maura Eden about the composting project currently in progress in the Orange Room and in Preschool teacher Jennifer Leu’s Green Room across the hall. Eden, Leu, their assistant teachers Camille Hewitt and Niamh Dolan, and their student teachers Christina Alicea and Shannon McSweeney, are all actively involved in the project.

“Jennifer had worked last summer at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” says Eden. “We knew we wanted to do something this spring where we didn’t have to go outside.”

None of the educators knew anything specifically about composting, so right away they brought in someone whom Eden calls their “resident expert,” Preschool parent Lauren Yaffe, mother of Kieran Huang. In addition to being a poet, Yaffe is an avid gardener.

Compost is made of decaying organic material, and occurs naturally wherever vegetation is growing and dying. Farmers have been creating their own compost to fertilize depleted soil for thousands of years. By the twentieth century most human-made compost had been pushed aside by professionally manufactured fertilizers, although many farmers and gardeners nowadays are returning to composting because it’s cheap, easy to make, and safer for the environment.

Using worms—those free-living invertebrate animals just below our feet—to aid in the decaying process is just one way to make compost. The month-long project began with students making a worm bin, essentially an in-house compost heap, in the Orange Room, and then populating it with red worms. (See how they did it, below.)

As part of her research, Eden read Amy Stewart’s book The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. Like Eden and Yaffe, author Stewart is not a scientist but a lay gardener.

“The Green Room has a terrarium with earthworms. This way the kids can go back and forth to both rooms and see two kinds of worms,” explained Eden. “They’re also learning writing and scientific observation by keeping journals.” Yaffe has also created a journal, a homemade picture book outlining her adventures in composting, which she wrote for the class. The whimsical book is entitled Worms, A Love Story.

“The kids are excited but the adults are learning, too,” says Eden, for whom the experiences of composting and raising worms is brand new. “I had no idea what I was doing, so I shared in their enthusiasm.”

Eden has also registered the classroom project in the Roots and Shoots program, an environmental institute founded by scientist Jane Goodall to encourage young people to become involved in environmental concerns in their communities.

During a recent class, Eden carefully removed the lid from the 10-gallon container in the floor of the Orange Room and gingerly sifted through the shredded newspaper caked with what appeared to be fertile, black topsoil, to reveal some adult red worms and their “threadlike babies” squirming in the darkness far below. “We’ve been bringing the worms lots of rotten fruit and things we don’t eat at lunch. Worms like anything that grows.”

“Worms like apple cores, worms like bananas, worms like paper!” explained one eager student.

“They don’t like juice boxes!” exclaimed another.

The rich, black soil the compost is evolving into is, in fact, “worm poop,” as one student put it. “They eat the food and they poop it out!”

Worms don’t see. They drink water through their skins. They’re hermaphrodites. They like to live in their own excrement. It’s, well, icky. “Four and five year olds respond to things like weird science,” says Eden. “They have a fascination with icky things.” Indeed, her students thrill when she tells them statistics like, “the longest worm on record was 22 feet long.” Fortunately, it was found far away from Brooklyn, in South Africa.

The project will conclude with students using the compost to grow plants in the classroom. “In keeping with Quaker teachings,” said Eden, “we learn that we help the worms and the worms help us.”

MAKING YOUR OWN WORM BIN

Here are the basics. For detailed information about indoor and outdoor composting in the City, see the website of the New York Compost Project, which has a complete guide to worm composting.

You will need:
10-gallon opaque plastic container with lid
fiberglass window screening (6" x 10")
duct tape
drill with 3/4" bit
scissors

Instructions:
1. drill 6 to 8 holes in the lid
2. cut screening into 2" x 2" squares
3. tape the pieces of screening inside the lid over the drilled holes

Worm Bin Recipe
5 pounds of shredded newspaper
1-1/2 gallons water
1 pound redworms
1 quart soil
1 quart food scraps

Instructions:
Put shredded paper in bin. Add soil. Add water and mix until paper is wet. Add worms. They will quickly move down into the paper, away from the light. Pull aside paper and deposit food scraps. Spread the shredded paper bedding over them. Put on the lid. Add food once or twice a week, in a different spot each time. Make sure the bedding is kept moist, not too wet.

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