Love the Worms

So when you love the worms, moles are enemy #1. I was adding food scraps for the worms in the worm pavilion when I discovered a baby mole. Cute maybe, but they grow up to eat up to their weight everyday. What do they eat? WORMS. This was a baby. My google search showed that moles can have 5 babies at once. Though they are solitary in their living, this was a family thinking that the worm pavilion was an all-you-can-eat buffet. We cannot have that when our worms are composting waste to make fertile soil for our garden. It just wouldn't work. So what to do? Solve the problem! I still wanted the worms to be able to enter or exit as they chose, but I didn't want the moles or mice to have that choice. With the help of my daughter and granddaughter, I emptied the pavilion, stapled a wire screen to the bottom, and problem solved. The worms were very happy and plentiful. My granddaughter found lots of baby worms to excite her and a baby toad that was entertaining for at least 15 minutes. It was a marvelous Monday!!!

April is for Nature

We educated 4th grade on the importance of worms in the garden. They explained square foot gardening to us. We worked together to plant our experiment gardens. Which soil will produce the best fruits and vegetables?...bagged raised bed soil, soil with worm tea, compost, or miracle grow. We cannot wait to see. For Earth Day, we tested earth surfaces to determine the most protective surface. We discovered that soil absorbs twice as much water as sand and pebbles. We know this because we had to dump in twice as much water to observe half as much come out the bottle. The soil with the grass growing kept the soil from eroding. Evidence of this was seen in the cleaner water. We love science.