Hello again, it's time once more for our monthly WEX blog from our young enthusiast, Freddie. The group met last Saturday and I'm sure that you have guessed the theme from my title today!
Over to Freddie who, as per usual, has written a fabulous account of their meeting.
This month at WEX we did all about wormeries and how worms help us in our daily lives.
While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, I completed a word search (like we always do) which was looking for words that are different ingredients of a wormery, for example a plastic bottle, sand, earth and paper.
After that I drew a diagram of the part worms play in helping in our water and nutrient cycles. Worms are very important in conditioning the soil for plants to grow in. They eat decomposing plant material and convert it into really good plant food.
Here is a picture:
Next, John and Clare, some of the leaders, showed us a PowerPoint of different types of worms. There were Lob worms, which are the really big ones from your garden that fishermen use to lure big fish, Brandling worms which are the smaller common worms, and giant worms from Australia that can grow up to 3 metres long!!! The ‘saddles’ you see on worms (look at the pictures at the top of the blog) show that they are fully mature adults.
Then we built our own small wormeries which were built from recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic soft drinks bottles. We got a PET bottle and cut off the top to make a cylindrical container. We put in a teeny bit of shredded paper at the bottom and then we used the cut off top of the bottle as a scoop to add about ten centimetres depth of compost.
Then we added the worms to the compost. We each put in 5 Brandling worms. On top of the worms we added some vegetable peelings from Delia’s last night’s supper (Delia is one of the leaders) and then a little bit more shredded paper with the cut off top as a bung at the top and some black paper round the outside to keep out the light which worms don’t like.
Here is what mine looked like:
Next Clare showed us how to make a big wormery. First, she got two plastic boxes and put them on top of each other, the one on the top with the lid so that the worms couldn’t escape. Then she filled it half the way up with soil and vegetables. Then we added all of the rest of the worms.
Finally, we split up into two groups, one group did a poster of what you shouldn’t feed worms and my group did a poster of what you should feed worms. Some of the things which you could feed them were carrots, cucumber and broccoli. Some of the things you couldn’t feed them were oranges, garlic and onions.
After WEX I went out to the hides like I normally do. Some of my spottings were shovelers, teal, lapwings, wigeon and some beautiful golden-eye ducks that actually spent more time underwater than it did on top of the water!
Nicola here...a big thank you to Freddie for all his hard work in producing this wonderfully informative and interesting blog. Good job! :)