Since we started working in the garden, the girls have loved finding worms. At first Bria was a little nervous about picking them up, but now she just grabs them and says they are tickling her hand. Nadia was never too scared of them. Of course, she has never been scared of creepy crawlies; quite the opposite really. I even have a picture of her holding a slug! So when I came across instructions for a worm hotel I decided to do it!. Here are the instructions we followed:
http://karrie-mcallister.suite101.com/popbottle-wormery-science-craft-a124055 First we started with a 2 liter bottle with the top cut off and a 16.9 oz bottle filled with water. Place the small bottle into the larger bottle; the small bottle keeps the worms towards the outside of the bottle. Then fill alternating between dirt and sand. The girls had a good time filling it even though we didn't get very even layers because of it. After it is pretty full, add some composting leaves to the top. Now you have a worm hotel. We also added some bread crumbs to the dirt to keep the worms alive longer.
Now for the girls favorite part, catching worms! Fortunately we didn't have to dig around a lot to find them. We headed straight to the container gardens, and sure enough as soon as we moved them we found worms. I am sure the recent rain helped as well. Nadia found 2 and Bria found 3 (one was a tiny little thing about an inch long). We put them on top and let them find their way into the dirt.
We took out hotel complete with worms inside and put a black paper cover around it because worms prefer dark. We also uncapped the water bottle and added some flowers. After that it was just waiting, and waiting, and waiting. A few days later I saw a small tunnel, and then nothing. Finally a week after we started (ironically the day the worm hotel was going to disappear because I decided we had killed our worms), I saw a worm actually digging a tunnel! The girls were pretty excited to see the tunnel with the worm too! So I suppose we will keep them a couple more days before turning them lose.
