PORT TOWNSEND — Do worms like pizza?
To students in Dorothy Stengel’s class, this is not an esoteric question. It is a matter of life and death.
“They can have pizza but only the crust,” Eileen Leosa said.
“Not the sauce, the cheese or the pepperoni,” Brenna Franklin added.
Eileen, Brenna and their classmates know what worms, at least red wigglers, like and don’t like, because they take care of more than 1,500 of the little critters that live in the black circular bin in their classroom at Grant Street Elementary School in Port Townsend.
As class pets go, the worms are not cute or cuddly, but they do have a quality that makes up for everything: Instead of the students having to clean up after them, the pets clean up after the students.
Waste reduction
The idea for the worm bin began last year when the students noticed how much garbage was thrown away at lunchtime, Auburn Lovett said.
It totaled two full garbage cans daily, classmate Alia Carlson said.
The students also learned where all that garbage goes after it’s collected — to a landfill 350 miles away.
So they looked for a way to reduce the amount of garbage they created and came up an idea: Separate food waste and use it to feed worms in a worm bin. The worms, happily eating, would turn the waste into compost.
So Stengel applied for a grant from the Washington State University Extension Master Gardeners of Jefferson County. It was approved last October, and the worms and their home were ordered.
Luckily, the worms arrived before the bin but after winter break, Stengel said.
The 2,000 red wigglers made the trip to Port Townsend in a cardboard box about the size of two bricks.
“They were inside a plastic bag filled with dirt,” Seamus Waibel said.
The students learned the hard way that worms can’t eat everything that is on the school lunch menu.
After having oranges for lunch, the students put all the peels in the worm bin, only to open up the bin and find that the worms committed mass vermicide.
“It burned their skins, and they crawled into the water and drowned,” Braden Bramhall explained. “It was very sad.”
Now the students add eggshells and sea shells to the mix to keep the soil balanced.
They’ve also learned that worms don’t like light but do like to be damp and how to keep the food from molding.
Worm journal
To keep track of what works and what doesn’t work, they each keep a worm journal.
“We write down questions we have and what the worms like,” Brenna said.
They use a scale to weigh how much food goes in and how much compost comes out.
The worm bin provides a focus for math and science and was their class project for the science fair.
In mid-May, Stengel’s students instituted an all-school food-waste-composting program and taught the other students what to do.
Now, at both first and second lunch period, there are worm tenders who get out the food-waste bucket and place it next to the garbage can, where they can monitor what goes in each.
On Friday, Stevie Lee Miller and Sophia Breithaupt volunteered to take the food-waste bucket out to the cans that will be picked up by area farmers.
“It’s not messy,” Stevie Lee said as she and Sophia shook out the bag. “It’s fun.”
The food waste is given to farmers because the class worms can’t eat it all.
But students in the Port Townsend High School shop have built a large worm bin, which will compost the food for the new school garden.
Stengel’s class uses the compost that their worms make in their own little berry and pea patch just outside their classroom window.
This spring, the class received a second WSU Master Gardeners grant to buy a set of garden tools sized for small hands.
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Port Townsend/Jefferson County reporter-columnist Jennifer Jackson can be reached at jjackson@olypen.com.
