OUR Lady of the Rosary School, Kenmore, has set up a worm café to help make the school more sustainable.
Former principal Ron Holmes returned to his old stomping ground to start up the Worm Café, supplying the school’s R-Team with a fresh batch of wriggly worms.
They in turn supplied food for the café.
The children of the R-Team had been trying to reduce their ecological footprint by collecting food scraps from the tuckshop and from lunchboxes to feed the school’s chickens and to build up the school’s compost bin.
It was proving to be an insurmountable goal as the school site is quite large and it was difficult to find a suitable site for the compost bin.
When Ron heard of the school’s unsuccessful attempts to close the loop and reduce waste in the school, he offered to come along and teach the staff and children about how to set up a worm farm.
Having bred composting worms for a number of years, Ron is something of an expert and he arrived at the school, complete with a bucket of wriggling worms, welcomed by 30 student representatives from the R-Team.
He talked to the children about what worms like to order from the tuckshop menu (fruit and vegetable scraps but not bread or dairy products) and showed them exactly how much the worms should be fed.
Each of the children took turns to hold the worms before adding more food scraps to the pile.
Finally, Ron showed the children how to add a layer of moist, shredded paper to the top of the worm farm before closing the lid and allowing the worms to work their magic.
Ron explained that after a few weeks the worms would produce “castings” or worm tea and he showed the R-Team how to drain the worm tea and dilute it, ready to be used as fertilizer on the garden.
Principal Andrew Oberthur said the school had also established a Sustainability Committee among parents and teachers.
Mr Oberthur said while the ultimate goal of the committee was to “make sustainability sustainable”; the committee also was responsible for developing a whole school action plan to reduce their ecological footprint.
He said their first step was to take action against waste – a process already underway by the very capable students of the R-Team, who live out the values of the Earth Charter.
“The R-Team’s motto is to Respect, Reduce, Re-use, Recycle and Renew and as well as reducing waste in the school, the R-Team also double as Power Rangers, monitoring electricity use in the school and rewarding classes for saving power.
“Earlier in the year, the R-Team were responsible for working with the St Vincent de Paul Society to collate 200 Hope Bags in support of local flood victims and they’re just about ready to start the next round of Hope Bags in preparation for Christmas,” he said
