TA Composts: Feed the Soil, Fuel the Earth!
October 02, 2023
This year, Thetford Academy’s Middle School Outdoor Leadership students are the stewards of all things compost. With tons of composting knowledge under their belts from composting with Cat Buxton at Thetford Elementary School (TES), students were ready to hit the ground running.
Each Friday, students collect full buckets of food scraps from five locations across campus. They weigh the collected material and record data points like consistency and ingredients and note if there are excessive amounts of any one particular food. They then take the buckets to the timber-framed compost facility, built by TA’s Timber Framing class in 2022. There, it’s added to the active pile, hydrated, and mixed with brown, carbon-rich materials like wood shavings from the Design Technology classes and paper towels from the Annex Building on campus.
Each week, the class adds about 50 lbs of food scraps. Last year, we diverted over one ton of food scraps from the landfill and used them to build soil fertility in our school garden. Our first batch of finished compost will be used this fall when we plant garlic. How much food waste will Middle School Outdoor Leadership Gather this year? Stay tuned!
