Vermicomposting: Session 1

This Tuesday's session was the first eco club class after the mid term exams. In keeping with our circularity and growing theme, we started vermicomposting with the students. The sessions will be facilitated by Elijah De Souza, a young agriculturist from Anjuna. 

This week, Vishal started with an introduction to nutrient cycling, which was followed by a brief talk by Elijah about the process of vermicomposting - materials used, earthworms involved, uses of the finished product. 




We did a dive into the worms' 'Holiday Home' as Elijah calls it, to have a look at some of the worms that would be doing the job of breaking down our dried leaves and cow dung. This ‘Holiday Home’ is a box of treats for the worms - vegetable waste, cardboard, mud and some vermicompost.


These particular earthworms are used due to their ability to eat their weight in food, which means a much higher yield of vermicompost. They're characterised by a groove running along their bodies, and are colloquially called 'Red Wigglers'.


After the introductory session in the classroom, we went outside to see the pits where we would start. It's important for the base of the pit to be solid, to prevent earthworms from escaping into the mud. These pits were concrete. We were going to be using 2 adjoining pits - one to mix the cow dung slurry, and the other to make the vermicompost layers. They both needed a lot of cleaning up. The pits were littered with dried cow dung, coconut tree leaves, heavy laterite bricks and lots of leaf litter and dust, along with some pieces of concrete slabs.

We all worked together to clean up the pits with spades ('khore' in Konkani) and large plastic bowls to collect the waste ('butti' in Konkani). We put this waste into jute sacks. Some of it can be used later.





By the end of 30 minutes, we were ready to start layering!

For this week's session, we completed the first layer (the only step not involving fresh cow dung). This layer comprises coconut shells turned upside down to creates air pockets for the worms to breed. We made sure to place them correctly for best results.

 
   

Next week we will start the dried leaf and cow dung layers! 

That's all for now :) 





I'd like to leave you with videos of some of the creatures we found: 



















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Designing a curriculum/ lesson plan for someone who knows nothing about designing a curriculum/ lesson plan

This process was a little daunting for me in the beginning. I don't have much experience in education and absolutely none in designing curriculums. When I got accepted to do the YouCAN Earth Educators Fellowship, and got invited to Tamil Nadu for the initiation workshop, I was certain that I'd be expected to have something of a plan in place. But all I had was a list of activities that I thought would be a fun integration of nature and waste.  Then we went for the workshop, which was easily one of the best experiences of my life. And for my curriculum, it taught me one thing - structure is important. If anything, it's important to have structure so you know how to break it.  When I left from the workshop, I had one day in Mysore to myself. And that was the first thing I did. Thought about structure. What does it mean? And also, instead of reinventing the wheel, would it be possible to take inspiration from any other well designed programmes?  That's when it hit me - use...
Read more

Vermicomposting Session 2

Image
This week, we decided that the vermicompost pit was more suited to another location. This pit had a mud base. As mentioned in my previous blog, the vermicompost pit has to have a solid base. Since this one did not, we had to search for something we could use that would prevent the worms from burrowing into the soil. And the best, most convenient answer? Plastic!  Repurposed, of course.  So we went on a hunt for any old flex we could find around the school. Sure enough, we found a huge sheet just near the school building. So we folded it in half and added it to the base of our pit.    Our next step was to transfer the coconut shells ('sonna' in Konkani) from the old pit to the new one. So we took our cement bags and collected the shells...    ..and then placed them face-down in the new pit. This is the base layer of the pit. The next layer is a mixture of dried leaves and cow dung slurry. To start, we collected dried leaves from the schoolyard, and placed th...
Read more

Session 4 - Observe

Image
This session was at a completely different pace than normal. Lots of the Eco-Club members had to go for hockey practice, so we had a small class of 6 to work with. The idea for this session was to build on the planting session last week in a fun and engaging way. We wanted to plan a session around what can be found in a garden environment, to learn about what's good for the plants we grow and what isn't.  Before the session, we had a chat within our small circle - Why did you join the Eco-Club?, What do you like about nature? We had the chance to have a much more candid conversation considering the smaller number. We got to learn that Mohammad S. and Valencio both catch snakes. Valencio said that he doesn't like that his parents kill snakes when they catch them, and he tells them not to, but they don't listen. Mohammad also grows vegetables in his house. So far he's grown turmeric in his kitchen garden. He had 2 coconuts in his bag to give to his friend for Dussehra...
Read more