Lets get down to basics! “The answer lies in the soil”
WHAT IS COMPOST?
Compost is the living, organic part of soil. Soil is a mixture of ground up rocks and compost. Compost is made up of decomposing plant and animal material. It is created naturally in any situation where plants and animals live, for example in a forest or on a farm. When they die plants and animals decompose and are broken down by bacteria into compost. Plants use the compost as their food.
When people create a garden they have to make the soil for their plants to grow in. Adding compost is the best way to make healthy soil which will grow healthy vegetables.
At school we have a lot of gardens growing vegetables so we need a lot of compost. We can make some of our own compost by collecting our food scraps and putting them in our worm farms. In the worm farms, the food scraps rot and are broken down by worms and bacteria. Compost is created and added to the gardens. (Brian Coleman)
WHAT IS A WORM FARM?
A worm farm is a place where food scraps and garden waste can be put for recycling into compost and liquid fertiliser.
At Edendale we have two(recycled!) old baths where the worms live. They are on an angle so that the liquid fertiliser can slowly drain out the plug hole into a container and be collected. The baths have lids because otherwise birds and rodents would quickly learn that there was free food about.
The worms are a special breed called tiger worms.
These tiger worms like to eat high quality food, rather than the dead leaves that earthworms prefer, and they will eat their own body weight each day.They eat, digest, excrete and reproduce happily in their bath. Food scraps are an ideal diet and produce high quality compost and liquid fertiliser. They munch their way through all our food scraps.
We collect the liquid fertiliser each week and apply it to our gardens and fruit trees.Slowly over a six month period the bath/worm farm becomes filled with the compost. To harvest the compost we carefully dig it out and separate the worms. We put the worms back and begin feeding them again. Next we can add the compost to vegetable beds or around the base of fruit trees.
Garden to Table at Edendale 
Mr Coleman, I think the worms are looking at me in an angry way
I like the worm farm picture
How come the worms are big and fat?
Mr Coleman – I think that you are doing a great job caring for our worm farms. I never realised that worms provided such high quality fertiliser. No wonder the plants at Edendale are doing so well.
Whoa! I want to make a worm farm!
A worm farm yay!!!!!!!!!!