brooklyngreenhouse:

A little girl comes to the museum every Thursday with her father. When she visits me in the greenhouse, we spray the plants, we water things, we start seedlings, but our favorite activity is sorting the worm bin.

We have a tiered worm bin in the greenhouse for composting kitchen scraps. I put scraps in the top three layers and the worms can move downwards through small holes in each layer to find food, cooler temperatures, or to get away from prying toddler fingers. The bottom layer is the only one we don’t “feed” with scraps – that’s where we collect the worm casings.

Photo: Greta Pemberton/Brooklyn Children’s Museum

We want the worms back on top where the food is, so every few days we sift through that bottom layer to find the worms and put them back on top, completing the cycle. It’s fun to see the casings accumulate, it’s fun to tell the kids that worm poop makes the best soil for their seeds to grow in, and it’s fun to feel the worms trying to dig their way out of your handful of soil, in between your fingers. Sometimes we talk about who would win in a fight, worms or snails (snails, duh).

Last week, my garden friend and I were sorting the bin together, and she kept finding little seeds the size of glass beads from a friendship bracelet.

Photo: Greta Pemberton/Brooklyn Children’s Museum

She’d found seeds in the bin before, green pepper seeds or tomato seeds, and we’d dried them out and germinated them. I didn’t recognize these – they were shiny, they were more delicate than most seeds, not packed full of nutritive tissue like an apple seed. Regardless, it was the end of the day, so I let her pocket a few to plant at home.

Now today I was flipping through a seed catalog and I saw the seeds – perfect little brown shiny globes with a nub at one end. They were marketing them as the perfect jump start to a new worm bin.

They’re worm cocoons.

I let her pocket worm cocoons.

Each “seed” will hatch 2-7 worms given the right conditions – a warm, dark, moist corner, about 70 degrees.

Not all that different from the conditions at the bottom of a kid’s dirty clothes hamper.

funny