Earlier on in the week, Te Ipukarea Society worked closely with the enthusiastic year 7 and 8 students from Titikaveka College, exploring the organic benefits of composting and worm farming.

Together, we learned how to turn everyday organic waste such as banana peels and hedge cuttings into valuable compost and worm tea, perfect for creating gardens that grow delicious vegetables, whilst lessening the load of valuable organic waste ending up in our landfill or burnt.

Key take home points from the session included how to make good compost. This involves ensuring your compost bin is layered with moist veggie and fruit scraps followed by dry organic material like paper and brown leaves, and continuing this pattern.

It’s all one big chemistry project, making sure your bin is well balanced with green waste containing nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and your dry brown materials making up the carbon component, preventing your compost bin from getting too wet and smelly.  

To put the students’ newfound knowledge into action, the class then set up the school’s very own composting bin “The Earthmaker” and worm farm unit “The Hungry Bin”. These had been donated to all schools in the Cook Islands about eight years ago by Te Ipukarea Society.

The worm farm required adding already made compost plus the red wiggler worms collected from the TIS office worm farm. Red wrigglers are typically found on the soil surface layer under materials that have been left on the soil for a long time. Red wrigglers play a significant role in breaking down organic material, turning green waste into compost. The students then took the initiative to add over ripe pawpaw fallen on the ground to feed their new red wriggler worms.

As for the Earthmaker Compost bin, it’s designed in a way so that its user fills the compost bin with organic material from the top, then over time the organic material breaks down with the heat from the sun combined with mixing the compost like a cake. With the compost bin taking on more gardening waste like hedges and grass cuttings, the students were quick to collect the freshly racked grass to start the composting process. It is important to keep the compost moist or it will not break down.

The composting and worm farm training offered by TIS is one of three educational programmes Te Ipukarea Society offers our local schools.

Keeping in line with the waste management theme, Te Ipukarea Society will also be sharing in collaboration with Cook Islands Family Welfare Association and Punanga Tauturu an awareness programme on reusable feminine hygiene products which includes the user-friendly comfortable to wear period undies. This project is supported by the New Zealand High Commission.

Our additional programmes include interactive discussions on ocean health, speaking about the current threats our ocean faces and how these threats can be managed.

A huge meitaki maata to Teava Iro, who generously provided a bag of rich compost from his Papaaroa composting site, to help kickstart the Titikaveka College worm farm. And of course, to the staff and the students of Titikaveka College for the fun hands-on morning getting our green fingers on.