Earthworms—love them or hate them, they are an important part of the ecosystem and should be every gardener’s best friend. Worms help to breakdown fruits and leaves that have fallen on the soil into nutrient rich compost. Adding a few worms to your compost heap will also have the same effect, speeding up the natural decomposing process and leaving you with natural goodness that will help your plants to grow in the future.
For children, worms can be fascinating creatures to watch—how they move and burrow their way into the earth, along with how they feel in their hands, curling up and even flipping over to move around can provide countless hours of fun and learning.
Making worm farms can be a fun homeschool or classroom project, but if you wanted something more permanent for children to watch this window into a fascinating life, then a transparent worm farming kit is just the thing for you.
Worm Farming Kit
While you’re watching the worms with your children you can educate them with one of our worm lesson plans, or wow them with great, weird and wonderful worm facts, such as these:
Worms breed on average every 7-10 days, perfect for the compost patch as they quickly grow their population!
Worms will eat their own body weight in vegetable matter each day. Imagine eating your weight every day!
Worms have up to 5 hearts.
The longest earthworm found was 22 foot long and was discovered in South Africa.
Earthworms can live up to 15 years.
The famous scientist, Charles Darwin, studied worms for 39 years!
There can be more than a million earthworms in an acre of land.
Worms are slimy for a reason—if they dried out they would die.
According to fossils, earthworms have been on the earth for around half a billion years.
Worms have neither teeth nor a tongue to help them eat their food.
Earthworms will eat around 10lbs of organic matter every year.
Worms are favorite foods for many birds and small mammals such as hedgehogs, foxes and even bears.
wriggly worms
