KDCOMPOST0305

You never know what might be happening in Mrs. Maria Plitt’s STEM Lab. This school year, we were asked to take care of the school composter, which is in the STEM Lab upstairs in our school.

When we first checked the composter, we put plants, banana peels and apple cores into it, but when we came back, it was all brown! Wait, we are jumping to the future a little bit. This is how we started out: We had to build it by setting it up. Then we put newspaper in it and dirt, with our favorite part being putting the worms in. They kind of looked dead because they were in a bag in the darkness with no food for a week while they were being shipped to us. When we dumped the worms gently in, they were in huge clumps. Then we put some dead plants and vegetable scraps in for the worms to eat. We put the composter under a light so the worms won’t go out of it because they seek the darkness, like they’re underground. In the spring time we will use the worm castings (what the worms leave behind after eating all the old scraps and other decomposing things) to put in our Eastport’s Green Dream Garden at our school. It is just like fertilizer!

Mrs. Plitt chooses students to help out with all the chores of our school’s garden year-round. That’s why we call her Eastport’s Green Dream Queen! She’d say that it’s all connected, from the wintertime composting to the sprouts in the spring, then the harvest and delivery to local food pantries and soup kitchens in the summer and fall.

Mrs. Plitt’s Garden Club and the third through sixth grades helped plant, pick and deliver tomatoes, potatoes, onions and more locally last year. It is good fun and good work for all.