20 Time Final Project: Shreya's POV

Here is a link to our TED talk project that showcases our bins that we used to plant the mint leaves, the one without worms (left) and the one with worms (right).

Vermiculture TED talk

Reflecting on your TED talk.

If I had a chance to do the presentation again, I would speak up louder to the microphone could catch my voice and speak more confidently. It was definitely an experience preparing for the talk, as it took a couple of times to get it perfect. We also taught that we should include minimal wording in our presentation and speak more about the project with few visuals in the background. Grading ourselves according to the rubric, I would say that we spoke to the audience an minimally looked at our notes, we talked about our progress and content of our project to the best of our ability, but we might have forgotten to include a couple of citations for the pictures we used. The whole 20 Time project turned out to be a very enriching and knowledgeable experience. I really enjoyed watching other TED talks and I will maybe even watch 2nd period's TED talks as well.

20 Time Individual Outline

For our 20% Time, we decided to view the benefits of vermiculture for ourselves. Clearly, worms play a large role in our ecosystem because of the way that they recycle and improve upon the quality of dirt. But how much? We made two plastic bins: one control bin and one bin with worms. After weeks, we extracted a bit of wormless worm dirt to temporarily house our flower seedlings. This was done because worms tend to eat seedlings because of how small and delicate they are. We performed a rudimentary soil analysis to determine nutrient content after neither our control box nor our worm box grow. We realized that the ratio and quality of our dirt was poor based on Grain size, Moisture, Compaction, and Permeability. After we replaced our dirt with some higher quality organic potting soil mix, we began to see results. We mapped out this result in a graphical format and a chart format. I challenged myself with our original goal from the get-go. Even though I could easily find a video or some books on vermiculture, I wanted to experience the difference that worms could make firsthand.
I chose this challenge because I was curious about the impact of worms on the growth of plants. I wanted to create two boxes that clearly demonstrated how a setting with worms was more helpful to plants than a box without them.

20 Time TED Talk outline

Individual Reflection from Shreya's point of view

Share the story of your 20% project and experience.

For our 20 Time project we wanted to grow a mini garden to see the benefits of vermiculture. Vermiculture is the process of using worms to decompose organic food waste, turning the waste into a nutrient-rich material capable of supplying necessary nutrients to help sustain plant growth. This method saves water, energy, and helps rebuild the soil. 

Our experience is one with many ups and downs, as the plants didn't start growing till the last six weeks of the project. 

How did you challenge yourself? 

This entire project was a great challenge, as creating a garden from scratch is quite difficult. It was hard to obtain all the materials for a cheap price and we didn't want to sacrifice the quality of the project but we didn't want to spend a huge amount of money. In a way this project thought us a thing or two about saving money and how to find cost-efficient products.

Why did you choose this challenge and what was your goal?

• Were you focused on self-improvement, creating something, helping others, etc?

When we were first thinking of project ideas both my partner and I were interested in eating healthier and we wanted to make a complete salad bowl from scratch. Our goal was to create a food item for which we knew where all the ingredients came from.

Discuss your plan to achieve your goal.

But we soon realized that the goal I described above was too ambitious but we still wanted to grow something from scratch and in our beginning stages we decided that it would be really cool to bring into our project live worms into our plant-growing process. We decided that we would try to grow as much as we could such as tomato plants, spinach, lettuce, and beans and then buy things we couldn't grow such as walnuts and dressing to put into our salad.

How did it go? Details!

• Success, failure, just getting started, life-long project, finished

Even this goal seemed too much for us to do because it left a lot to chance. We hit a major road bump about six weeks into the project when none of our plants would grow. We soon realized it was because of the soil composition. We used natural soil from outside and we didn't think that we needed any fertilizer or anything. We used natural soil because we didn't want to spent more money buying soil. But the natural soil was very dry and course. It had too many twigs and rocks and not enough healthy nutrients for the plants to grow. We had to replace the soil with healthier soil and we bought a small pack of fertilizer for better growth. Also we realized that it was too late in the game to start growing food products like tomatoes, beans, and spinach so we modified our type of plant into mint plants because they grow fast.

What did you learn?

We learned a lot about worms and worm types. Redworms do the trick and we learned a little bit about how to take of the worms. We must feed them with compost, like banana peels and keep them in appropriate temperatures. And we learned a lot about soil composition. Soil composition is an important aspect of nutrient management. While soil minerals and organic matter hold and store nutrients, soil water is what readily provides nutrients for plant uptake.

If you had a chance to do this project again, what would you do differently? 
If we had the chance to do this project again, we would learn from our mistakes and better make use of our time. Our mistakes cost us nearly six weeks and more of time, time that the food plants could have used to grow. So if we had to do it again, I wouldn't worry much about the money and buy whatever we needed to yield the best results.

What’s next?

• Continuing this challenge.

Because it is not too much of a hassle, we will continue this project for as long as we can. I am going to India over the summer so I probably cannot look over the bins but if it doesn't work out we will have to end our project. But I learned a lot about growing plants so maybe in the future when I have a house of my own I may start this project again and hopefully better results will come out of it.

• Sharing with others

I have been sharing a lot of my findings with my mom because she also grows flowers, mainly roses, in our backyard so I thought she might be interested in my project. Plus we live in Saratoga where the weather can be kind of cold which leads to poor soil and slow plant growth so hopefully I gave my mom an idea of vermiculture so her plants can grow faster and better.

• A new challenge

If we had to choose a new challenge it would be to actually grow a full vegetable and fruit garden without the worm component.

A little bit more about soil composition...

As you can read from last week's post, we had to start over because our soil that we used to plant the vegetable seeds was not compatible to grow healthy plants. It was mostly composed of rocks and sticks, which doesn't facilitate growth as well. So this week I thought it would nice to write more about soil composition, a topic that I and my partner have been researching so we don't run into more problems in our second go around. Soil composition is an important aspect of nutrient management. While soil minerals and organic matter hold and store nutrients, soil water is what readily provides nutrients for plant uptake.

So we replanted the box and finally added the worms, here are some pictures.

Poor Dirt Quality

Since we've last updated this blog, we've begun to realize that our plants are not growing as fast as we would like. It has been over a week and a half and all three plants have yet to break the surface of the soil. Because of this, we reevaluated the quality of the soil that the plants were grown in. We quickly realized that we should have used potting soil instead of soil from the natural earth, which contains an unusually high quantity of rocks and sticks. We believe that this is the reason that our plants are not growing as well as we expected. We plan to remove all the soil and newspaper shreddings and start from stage one. We will replace the layer of newspaper and replace the dirt with potting soil, which contains more nutrients. Afterwards, we plan to replant the three types of seeds. We hope that this will help the plants grow faster. Although we are disappointed with the outcome, we still have high hopes that adjusting our plan slightly will help the plants develop at the pace we originally predicted.

We started the planting process!!

It has been two weeks since our last blog post and we started the planting process of the seeds. We first had to find two boxes to grow our plants. One of these boxes would serve as our control and the other our experimental variable. Our control box contains dirt almost 3/4th of the way and we laid seeds on the top bed of the dirt. The variable box has shredded newspaper about 1/2 way through and dirt about 1/4th of the rest of the box. We planted seeds on the upper layer of the dirt. The main difference in the boxes is that the variable box is going to act as a compost bin. We are waiting will the plant grow a little bit before we put in the worms. We are doing this because we don't want the worms to eat the seeds even before they grow.
We have yet to create lids for our boxes which came without a lid. We were going to do that with duct-tape and then makes holes in it so the worms can breathe. We don't need it right away because we haven't put the worms in the variable compost bin.
Although it rained the past couple of weeks our plants have yet to grow but because it will rain the following week we really hope the plants grow to about 5 inches so that we can put in the worms. We water the boxes every day once.
The seeds we used include tomato seeds, pea seeds and spinach seeds.

Vermiculture 20 Time Introduction

Worms are some of the most significant creatures on this planet, as worms can consume their body weight everyday and can process about 10 pounds of organic material a year. Earthworms work tirelessly throughout their lives cultivating and fertilizing soil for plants to grow. We were given the opportunity to participate in 20 Time, a concept that dedicates 20% of student class time for working towards an ultimate goal. We are encouraged to find a solution that has an end goal of helping others. So for our 20 Time project we wanted to see worms in action, doing what they do best: eat to help our ecosystem thrive.

For our project, we plan to create a compost bin for the cultivation of fertilized soil by worms. We will compare the growth of plants, regarding both worm soil vs. regular potting soil. Plants will be measured by height, and hopefully, we will be able to produce two small meals: one aided by worms and the other not. Our goal is to demonstrate the positive differences created by the presence of worms in our environment in a tangible process. We hypothesize that there will be a significant increase of growth of plants in the worm soil versus the growth of plants in the regular potting soil. On a weekly basis, we will be recording the status and conditions that the worms are thriving under. During the growth period of our plants, we will be researching more about a worm’s contribution to our environmental status and we plan to keep this blog updated.

Thanks for reading.