Forever Changing

We converted an old, worn out sensory table into a worm bin that lived adjacent to our playground garden.I began by drilling holes in the bottom so it could drain, then filled it with soil, from a previous garden that had been left to fend for itself for years, maybe decades. A variety of weeds had taken root, native plants hearty enough to survive in our urban setting. The children had already discovered that there were earthworms aplenty, so we filled our aspiring bin one afternoon with spadefuls of dirt, stems, leaves, roots, and worms. The worms weren't having it. Within hours they were dangling from the bottom of the table, making their escape from the holes I'd drilled in the bottom. They had found themselves in the wrong ecological niche. Earthworms have evolved to dig in all directions, including vertically. The shallow bin was simply the wrong habitat and they took matters into their own hands (so to speak) by returning to where they belong. This is when we learned that what…