In School - Worms are liking their new home

The worms seem to have settled in and are thriving. No escaping. Eating lots. They don't even seem to mind the chilly temperature in our house. It has been around 50 in the family room during the day and at least 10 degrees colder at night.

The worms in the kitchen scrap bin seem to be eating quite well. It is getting a bit damp in there. Kitchen scraps seem to have more water in them than the garden scraps (old hay, frozen chard leaves, and some semi-rotted leaves from the neighbors trees.) We will have to adjust the bedding a bit to dry things out or they will start trying to escape again.

In School - The Worms Are Here!!

The worms came today!

It was very exciting, at first. Then I remembered that I still had a little work to do on my worm bins. I did it though.

I had to drill holes in one that I hadn’t done yet.

I had to moisten the newspaper.

That was a lot of newspaper, for those of you who are thinking about doing a worm farm here’s a tip, if you are using newspaper and are shredding it before hand plan on shredding at least twice the amount per bin, I made that mistake while doing it.

For my experiment we are focusing on weight.

So, we were separating the worms (1000 of them) into two bins. We had to measure out half of them for each bin.

In other words we (I) had to get in that bag of 1000 worms and pull them of the bag and measure out half the worms.

I have to admit that when I saw that bag of worms I didn’t really want to do it. So I could get the feel for it my dad pulled out one worm and placed on my hand.

(I also have to admit that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be).

That’s the end of my first day with the worms. They are all settled in. Now I just have to figure out how to keep up with our 1000 extra house guests.

In School - JJ's science fair project

The other day I brought home a book from the library. It's called The Earth Moved by Amy Stewart. It's about earthworms. I've enjoyed Amy's blog Garden Rant, and thought I might find some ideas and inspiration in her book. I'd brought the book home intending to start it as soon as I finished my current book. But JJ stole it, and hasn't put it down. We seem to have a budding oligochaetologist in the family. Next thing I knew she was planning a worm composting project for the science fair, ordering 1000 worms, and writing posts for the farm blog. Here's what she has to say today.


Worm Scientists
(Oligochaetologist)
Need Support


The past few days I’ve been interested in worms. The other day I was reading a book about earthworms and I found out that worm scientists aren’t getting very much popular support. The scientists were surprised to find that many people were not as interested in worms as they were. I think that the scientists aren’t getting enough support because not many people realize how important worms are and what they do for our environment. Worms may not be as pretty birds, butterflies, or bees but the birds wouldn’t have the seeds they like and the butterflies and bees wouldn’t have their nectar if the soil wasn’t good for plants like flowers and trees. The worms that we may think of as slimy pests actually do a lot to help our environment. So if we support our worm scientists then instead of feeling down when they discover something because besides them nobody else seems to care they will feel happy and excited because they know that everyone else is too. All we have to do is support them.

We will post updates about the science fair as things progress over the next month.