Kitchen Garden Compost Lab
Mid-day meal waste feeds a three-bin compost system that students monitor with thermometers and pH strips, growing vegetables for their own lunch.
Meera PatelScience Teacher · Shree Saraswati Vidya MandirAbout 6 kg of vegetable peel comes out of our mid-day meal kitchen every day. It used to be thrown away. Now it runs a science lab.
Students built three compost bins from old drums. Every day a rota group weighs the waste, records the temperature inside each bin and checks moisture. Once a fortnight they test the pH and record it on a wall chart.
The compost goes into a kitchen garden with spinach, brinjal, tomatoes and methi, which has gone back into the mid-day meal twice this season.
Curriculum links: decomposition, microbes, nutrient cycles, data handling and graphs. The children also learnt to argue with the cook about which peels are allowed in the bin.
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