Literacy for Environmental Justice now has a ‘worm farm!’ We started our worms early this year and finally have enough worms and enough worm poop to do our first harvest! Worm poop, or “castings” are highly nutrias plant food and a great way to sustainable dispose of food waste. Our Eco-Apprentice, Rainey Korang, now graduated, set up the bin and Myah Rivera, soon to move on, has been caring for it since. This preliminary harvest was done to learn about the harvesting methodology so later on, future Eco-Apprentices can implement these practices. We are hoping to incorporate our independently produced worm castings into the fertilization treatment of LEJ’s plants.
Currently, worm castings are purchased from an offsite facility, but because of LEJ’s mission to be as local, independent and to close the resource loop as much as possible, we are attempting to produce enough of our castings onsite.
On the day of harvest, the summer youth were able to participate in the harvesting! This was an important learning experience because the youth were able to interact with the worms and learn about the process worms go through to create fertilizer. Even though most students were grossed out by the idea that we were handling worm poop, they were also very respectful of the process and genuinely interested in harvesting.