Glencoe Elementary School

Glencoe started their worm bin project in October 1999. The purpose was to reduce food waste in the cafeteria. When we started we had not a clue as to how to take care of the worms. All we knew was what we had learned at a Green School Summit and what was explained to us by our AmeriCorp volunteer, Christy. She had set up our bin and we started with one pound of worms. She gave a presentation to the fifth grade class that was adopting our bin and we started feeding them about a week later. We ran into a problem shortly afterwards because our bin was always too wet. We added leaves and ripped newspaper but neither seemed to help. Instead of feeding twice a week as we had aniticpated, we were feeding only once every two weeks. We also noticed that our worms were decreasing in numbers instead of increasing. By December, we basically abandoned our worm bin until we could do further research to determine why we failed. We named our bin "The Titanic" because it "sank" but we had a few survivors!

We were not detered however! With a grant from Metro we were determined to make this work. We purchased another worm bin and this one was delivered in January 2000. By March we had a plan and we purchased 2 pounds of worms and were ready to start again. We also put a student from the fifth grade class in charge of workers so we could get some consistency in care.

The following pictures were the steps we went through when we set up our new bin "The Yellow Submarine."

This is what our bin looks like inside before we made our "bed" for our worms. The cords will support our bedding of paper, straw and leaves.
We lined the bottom with several layers of newspaper to keep stuff from falling through.
We next put a layer of straw that had been soaked in water over the paper. This straw was about 3 inches deep.
Next we added dried leaves about 4 inches deep.
It's good to mix some straw in with the leaves as we did here.

We added our worms to the bin next. We gave them a little food and fed them normally about a week later. 

To make them feel at home we covered everything up with an additional layer of straw.

Finally we placed a piece of landscaping cloth on top to keep in the moisture.

Update
Things have changed since we started our worm bins in 1999. We continue to check on our worms weekly. We have learned that by dividing our bin area into thirds and feeding in a rotational order that we are able to feed on a more regular basis. We have discovered that citrus fruits are not good to feed our worms, while melons and lettuce are very high on their "We love it!" list. One problem we ran into was our worms freezing in the winter. We solved this problem by lining the sides and bottom of the bin with an extra layer of straw. Now our worms stay cozy all winter long. Our consistent "Worm Team" of 4 second graders who take care of the worms throughout the school year has been a great boost also. We have created a journal and check list that the team uses each week to keep track of the progress and the amount of care our worms need.

Our compost that we get from our bins goes into our outdoor gardens. We also use our worm tea to fertilize the flowers around our school.