Adding Wiggle Room - Worms and Black Gold

Category: Xeriscaping, Grow Lawnless, Butterfly and Habitat Gardens | Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:54 am

I've given thousands of worms a home in my gardens and yards and all have benefitted from their activities and their "castings" as a super-fertilizer. humusy, organic fertilizer. i'm pretty sure it's worm poop..whatever it is, it's what they're not using anymore or digesting.

A healthy colony of worms keeps the soil aerated by tunneling, provides instantly available and slow-released nutrients. My gardens and i have all benefited by our combined efforts. All the plants are happier. Digging in the garden gets way easier, transplants don't go into shock as often with the high quality of the soil. And you won't believe the eventual quality of even hard clay like mine.

Some folks like to raise them in a bin to digest materials and pop out compost. I don't have time or the desire for all the details, and i don't really want to have to remember all the steps. I use the shortcut and just purchased worms to a newly dug garden to add the population. Worm castings are expensive - it's easier to colonize, feed, and let them do the digging and fertilizing.

The trick is to keep them happy so they reproduce and they'll stay. My gardens are mulched with organic materials, which eventually break down. The worms come up at night to munch on it or munch it from below, burrow back down (aerating the soil as they do it), excrete the castings as fertilizer, reproduce and on it goes. They eat a lot, so you get a lot of castings as fertilizer. They eat, crank out fertilizer, all is good.

How to keep them there? if you throw your kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, sprinkle cornmeal on your garden, they'll feed. I've sprinkled at night, next morning, the stuff is gone. the more they feed, the more they compost, the more castings you get and it just gets better. They're busy underground in the day, they don't like daylight. But out they come at night. I have nightcrawlers, plain old earthworms. And just for good measure, the compost bin type,red wrigglers or wigglers, can't remember what they're called officially. all available "live" by mail order.

My garden has an underground city going, some are quite large - so they do like it there - as long as you provide some type of organic material to make it attractive to them to stay, they're not wiggling off anywhere... although i do sacrifice some for fishing purposes. There are plenty when they came from.

If you keep the worms healthy and happy, they reproduce quickly, and you are also contributing to your bird visitors to the garden. They'll take some but there'll be plenty left for the garden. I've never had a flock of birds digging -a few robins in the spring apparently keep that secret to themselves. So in effect, you've created a habitat garden.

Areas mulched with bark and straw, etc. are best, and are a source of food and shelter. mix in some of your soft kitchen scraps into the mulch. I add my used coffee grounds, the filters and tea bags, sometimes pulverized egg shells,that i use under my plants anyway, veggie peelings. Not too much since i don't want critters sniffing it out at night.Organic mulches keep it damp longer, worms don't like sunshine or to dry out. Damp shredded packing newspaper (not the color magazine types please) mixed into the mulch they seem to enjoy, as well.

If you feed them, they will stay.

Last edited: Thu Jul 03, 2008 5:00 pm

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Droopy wrote on Thu Jul 03, 2008 7:27 am:

Our worms look happy. There's plenty of them, even though visiting hedgehogs think they're a delicacy. I don't mind loosing a few to the wildlife.

eileen wrote on Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:29 am:

I've always had a worm filled garden which I and the wildlife appreciate to the full. My compost bins are always wriggling with them too which is ideal.

Frank wrote on Thu Jul 03, 2008 11:29 am:

Wonderful blog entry Mary, we all need to be reminded from time to time just how useful our little wriggly friends can be.

If you are interested there is a lot more written about vermiculture by member Wormnwomn in another blog here:

http://www.gardenstew.com/blog/c1293-1-worm-bin-composting.html

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