Four worm experiment - addition
After setting up my four worm experiment and telling my family about it, they informed me that Shrek the Third has a bonus feature that talks about being green, not like Shrek, but Earth friendly green, by making a small worm bin out of a soda bottle. I haven’t actually seen the bonus feature, but thought it was great that it got my two boys interested in setting up their own worm bins. We didn’t have any empty soda bottles around so I helped them setup bins using some old snack good containers.
Each boy setup their own bin with my help. We tried to layer the different materials so they can see how the worms mix up the layers. The layers from bottom to top were card board, composted alpaca manure, grapefruit peel, shredded office paper, more card board, fiber egg carton and finally some more shredded paper on the top. All were nicely soaked before putting in the container. I also set up an bin for myself using the same container, but instead of the grapefruit used some chicken feed. I didn’t want to use the chicken feed in the boys as I’m not sure how the worms will do with it.
Then came the fun part, searching the existing bin for that specific worm! Actually I wasn’t too particular but the boys were, they had to be just the right ones, which usually meant the biggest they could find. This was actually an educational experience for me. We actually wound up dumping the entire bin/bucket out and sorting through it, hopefully the major disruption doesn’t set it back too far. I do think I finally found a worm cocoon and there were lots of young worms in the bin.
I did convince the boys to only include four worms in their bins, so now I have a total of four different four worm experiments going on. It will be interesting to see how these work in the smaller containers.
We did drill several holes at the top of the containers for air, but the bottom is still closed so hopefully not too much water accumulates there. I was a little disappointed to learn that the bonus feature on the Shrek movie didn’t talk about cover the 
outside of the container with anything. Worms like it dark so when using a clear container it should be covered for the comfort of the worms. Our containers worked nicely for wrapping a piece of newspaper around them to keep them dark. This will be nice because we’ll hopefully be able to monitor the progress of the bin some with a minimal amount of disturbance.
Allen
