Worm Casting Harvest

At Linville Edom Elementary School you can walk into the 3rd grade classroom and not realize that they have “pets”.  There is no smell or loud commotion coming from their pets….that’s because they have WORMS!  That’s right-there are about 1,000 worms living in a worm bin located in the corner away from the windows.  I decided to start this project with Linville because the school had a strong gardening program and a beautiful garden located behind the school.  We didn’t want to spray the garden with any chemicals but still wanted to be able to fertilize the plants.  Solution?  Worm castings (poop)!  Worm castings are an excellent source of fertilizer for your garden or plants.  Plus-they eat your unwanted garbage!  If the worm bin is properly taken care of there is not a trace of smell.  After 3-5 months your worms will have decomposed everything in your bin to provide a nice array of worm castings.  There is a sorting process of putting food in the bin above so the worms force themselves to move up and out of the castings but not all worms make it!  Therefore, we had to dumb the castings out and sort through the piles to pick out the worms.  Worms found were then placed back into the bin to continue eating garbage.  The castings are now ready for plant application!  Our castings were ready but our garden isn’t!  Therefore, we simply placed our worm casting harvest into plastic containers and will wait until spring to apply to the garden.

Interested in learning more about worms?  Contact Rosemary to learn more!