While you may have the urge to do some heavy spring cleaning this season, there is no better time to involve your kids with a really dirty project that gets them thinking about the environment. This Spring, create a worm composting bin with your children. It’s educational, easy to set up and the worm castings will benefit your garden this summer.
Start with a Styrofoam cooler (worms don’t eat Styrofoam, and you will be making use of something that could otherwise end up in a landfill). Punch air holes about the size of dimes around the top rim. Next, create ‘bedding’ for your worms. The bedding can consist of shredded paper soaked in water and then squeezed out. It should be moist but not wet. Add used coffee grounds and crushed eggshells and mix well to aerate.
For this type of composting you will need to obtain Red Wriggler worms. Red Wrigglers contribute to our soil by converting raw organic wastes (most of your food scraps) into a nutrient rich soil-like additive that can be used in your garden. Worms can easily process half their body weight in food each day. The material that actually passes through the gut of a worm is called castings (a much better term than worm poop). Worm castings are odorless, rich in phosphorus and nitrogen and are touted as being the best type of fertilizer around.
Here is a simple list of scraps you can give your worms: fruit and vegetable (scraps and peels), tea bags (the bag itself too), coffee grounds and filters, crushed eggshells, newspaper, cardboard, egg cartons, old flowers, pasta, rice, wet bread & cereal, hair, small amounts of dust from your vacuum cleaner, and broken up pieces of lint from your dryer. Avoid onions, garlic, citrus, dairy products, seafood, meat, oil, pet droppings, and chilies.
If making a worm composting bin seems like a family project you would like to take on, it is highly recommended that you visit the following websites which have very detailed information about how to create and maintain a successful worm bin as well as a useful troubleshooting section:
http://www.solanacenter.org/1solana_compost.html
http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/bse/442-005/442-005.html
BOOKS
Two great books to check out:
Diary of a Worm
Doreen Cronin
This adorable story about the daily life of a worm is a great way to get younger kids thinking about our underground friends. Worms really do eat paper and the worm in this story actually eats his own homework.
The Life Cycle of an Earthworm
Bobbie Kalman
Worms play such a crucial role to our earth and teaching our children about them reinforces how just how important every creature on the planet is to our ecosystem. The Life Cycle of an Earthworm is geared for older children and basically covers everything you could want to know about our slippery garden friends.
MEDIA
Two great movies to check out with your family that have very earth-friendly messages:
TO RENT: WALL-E, released in June 2008 from Pixar Animation Studios, is the story of a robot named WALL-E who is designed to clean up hundred of years of waste left on planet earth. While much of the movie is a love story between WALL-E and EVE, another robot, the movie’s message warning of the pitfalls of over consumption and lack of environmental stewardship come through loud and clear. See http://www.pixar.com/theater/trailers/walle/index.html for a movie trailer.
TO SEE IN THEATERS: Walt Disney Studios will release EARTH on Earth Day 2009. This feature-length documentary is promoted as a family film and narrated by James Earl Jones. Disney’s EARTH will take audiences on a tour of our planet with rare and beautiful imagery from the world’s top cinematographers. While enjoying the outdoors is certainly a great way to honor our planet, this movie seems like it will be a wonderful opportunity to show our children many aspects of our natural world that they may not otherwise experience. See http://disney.go.com/disneynature/earth/ for a sampling of the movie coming out April 22, 2009.
Tags: activities, books, composting, Earth, environmental stewardship, kids, movies, stewardship
