Creating our worm farm!

Our worm farm has been out of action for a few months now and with our new focus on sustainability we decided it was time to get it set up again. We read "Our wriggly worm farm" and learnt lots of interesting facts like compost creates smelly gases that harm our environment and that we can help out by composting some of our food.  Worm farms are a great way to do this, helping our environment too, how awesome is that!  Well we really want to be helpful kiwi's so we are going to try our best at being more sustainable too!

Kaiako Deanne brought a box of worms, how hilarious the tamariki thought, there were shrieks of giggles, who knew you could buy a box of worms!!  1000 of them, ewwwww!! These worms are just the right worms for our farm, they are called Tiger worms.

Our worm farm was looking a little sad, it really needed a makeover, what did we need to add to make it a great habitat for our worms

Kaiako Nikki read the instructions on the worm farm to let us know what we needed to make a good home for our worms.  Paper, wet bedding, soil......  (lucky the food bag gives us great recyclable wool, perfect for worm farming).  We collected our resources, wet the bedding and lined our bins.

Then it was time to open the box of worms

Coco was ever so brave offering to help transfer them to their new home

"Ooh" Claudia gasped, she couldn't believe how wriggly and slimy they were

We then moved our Worm farm to a more shady spot and added a pot at the bottom to help the worms climb back up.

We will take turns to feed and care for our worm farm.  We have lots of food scraps each day and worms can eat all kind of things, like fruit and vegetables scraps and leaves from the garden.  Worms can eat strange things too, like cotton clothes, paper, dust and hair!.  Worms do not like citrus though and onions, garlic chilli and meat make them sick, so we will make sure we don't give them that. 

Having a worm farm also means that we can collect worm wee.  It makes excellent fertiliser that we can pour on our garden which will help our plants to grow.  We can collect worm poo too!  Worm poo is known as vermicast.  When we mix worm poo into our soil, it also helps our plants grow big and strong.