Educational Worm Experiments
Fun and Educational Experiments You Can Try with Your Worm Farm
Hello to all you worm farmers out there! Looking for some creative ways to learn about how your worm farms operate? We've got some fun experiments you can try with your worm farm, old or new! We used red wiggler worms for our experiments.
Experiment 1: Put a whole piece of fruit that is starting to go bad in your farm. Make a hypothesis on how long your piece of fruit will last in the farm. Check on it once every few days until the piece of fruit is gone! For example, this is a piece cantaloupe that we added to one of our farms, and all that is left is just a small piece of the skin. This experiment is perfect for learning about how long food waste can last in an active worm farm.
Experiment 2: Put a couple of seeds from a tomato or a melon into your worm farm. Make a hypothesis on how many of the seeds will sprout and how long they will take. This experiment shows how worm castings make a great seed starter.
Experiment 3: Make a smaller worm farm out of a wide mouth container or small bucket, and put 10 or so worms in it. Make a hypothesis on how many worms you will have after 3 months. This experiment is designed to show you the average reproduction cycle of your worms.
Experiment 4: Take some of the worm castings from your worm farm and mix it with some potting soil. Use two of the same plants, one planted in plain potting soil and the other planted in the worm casting/potting soil mixture. Do a side-by-side comparison of the two plants and see what the differences are. This experiment is perfect for seeing the benefits that worm castings have on your plants compared to standard potting soil.
Experiment 5: Measure the length and the weight of the different sized worms for your farm to see which are matured and which ones are still growing. This experiment is meant to show the difference between a fully grown worm and a worm that is still maturing.
Experiment 6: Weigh out the food you are feeding your worm farm over the course of 2 or 3 months. Then go to a food calculator website and input the amount of food you composted with your worms. It will show you how much gas and electricity you saved by composting, and it is a great way to show how much food waste you prevented from going into a land fill. Here is an example of what we composted this last year. 1000 pounds! This experiment can be done after any predetermined amount of time. If you feel up to it, keep track of it for the year and you can really see how much food waste your worms are capable of consuming!
Bonus Experiment: Collect toilet paper tubes until you have enough to fill a baking dish. Fill the toilet paper tubes with ground-up food and freeze them. Feed each farm one tube of food at a time. This is a great way to know you always have food for them, and once it's frozen, it can go into a plastic shopping back or a sealed bag and get stored in the freezer. It's also a great way to give them a cool snack in the summer when you might need to keep them cool.
