Worms! Soil-building Workhorses

(Page 4 of 4)

June/July 2008
By Barbara Pleasant 
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Food. Earthworms in new bins respond best to grain-based foods at first, probably because they decompose so quickly. Leftover cornmeal, oatmeal, old bread or cooked rice, buried in small caches just beneath the surface, make wonderful starter foods because they will rot within days, and earthworms prefer food that is active with working fungi and bacteria. Used coffee grounds (with filters) can simply be dumped on top. When feeding worms kitchen waste, wait until the buried food disappears to add more.

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Water. Check a new bin weekly for a month to make sure the bedding is uniformly moist. After that, your worms will be just fine even if you forget about them for weeks at a time. But that’s not likely to happen because keeping an indoor worm bin is so much fun!

How to Herd Worms

You can call a dog or shoo a cat, but the best way to move earthworms is to herd them with light. To harvest vermicompost from a bin, gently pile a cone of material from your worm bin on a flat surface in bright light and wait about an hour. The worms will form a dense mass in the core of the cone.

Occasionally earthworms decide to leave a bin that’s become too crowded or damp. You can wick out excess moisture with cigars made of tightly rolled dry newspaper (which can then be torn into new bedding). Until you can set things right, prevent runaways by removing the bin’s cover and keeping a light on at night.

Tillers are murder on earthworms, but even gentle hand cultivation causes casualties. A week or so before cultivating a bed that’s well-populated with earthworms, set up a haven nearby such as a compost pile, mulched pathway or a cache of buried food scraps. Meanwhile, allow the place you plan to dig to become dry. Many worms will migrate to the better habitat, escaping a tragically premature end.

Adapted from contributing editor Barbara Pleasant’s newest book, The Complete Compost Gardening Guide.
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  • Norm 11/3/2008 8:46:03 AM

    Great article on earthworms! I tried a couple of the projects. One I really liked in particular; I dug a hole about 20 inches deep by 12 inches square and filled it almost to the top with trimmings from my kitchen. I also had some Quaker Oats that had been on the shelf a bit too long that I tossed in.
    I covered it to the top with some dirt put a cement stepping stone on top that I had been tripping over anyway.
    I did this probably the first part of July and checked the middle of September. Wow! In return for feeding the worms they gave me back some wonderful loamy sandy looking soil! Very impressive. Needless to say I put that in my little box garden and immediatly filled my "worm feeder" back up! Thanks Mother, keep the articles coming!

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