Monday, October 12, 2009

Composting at Ida B. Wells

Students at Ida B. Wells are beginning to see themselves as part of the nutrient cycle. Rather than throwing out all food wastes, we're taking discarded scraps from the school's cooking class and returning them back to the earth in the form of compost.



Last month, Mr. Hannon's class, our volunteers, and Urban Sprouts intern, Kevin, pitched in to build compost bins at Ida B. Wells. Instead of buying all new materials for the bins, we decided to recycle wooden pallets, which are usually tossed out after only one use.




We sat down to cut up compost materials the following week to speed up the decomposition process. We have yet to reach the 3' x 3' x 3' volume needed to really get our pile going, but we're slowly adding yard waste from our garden and organic food scraps from the Ida B. Wells kitchen. In the end, we hope to harvest compost to enrich our soil and help our garden flourish!

2 comments:

Creatives4Community said...

That is tight! Nice work. Have you been able to integrate any of this work directly into classroom benchmarks? An effort to create a comprehensive composting, food production, and nutrition system has been a school board MISS for decades. Good work!

Gina Davis said...

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