Worms! Soil-building Workhorses
(Page 2 of 4)
June/July 2008
By Barbara Pleasant
Conduct composting projects in your garden, especially slow heaps that will basically sit there until they are done. Night crawlers often build deep, elaborate burrows beneath piles of slow compost.
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Try straw bale beds (see explanation, How to Make Instant No-dig Garden Beds), or simply let a pile of old hay rot atop an infertile spot. The biggest, most energetic night crawlers I’ve ever seen grew into giants beneath a bale of decomposing hay.
Raising and Releasing Your Captives
Night crawlers need to burrow like birds need to fly, so they are only marginally happy when reared in bins. Yet common red worms or field worms (Aporrectodea species, which can be gray, pink or even green) do fine in bins as long as you provide them with a pleasing habitat (See “Captive but Comfortable Environments for Worms,” below). When I transfer worms from my garden to the all-you-can-eat buffet conditions in a bin, they transform the mixture of bedding and food into finished worm compost in four to five months. The fresh compost also includes hundreds (or thousands) of cocoons, so as I use it in my garden, I simultaneously distribute a new generation of ready-to-hatch earthworms.
With few exceptions, the earthworms that inhabit North American gardens are exotic species introduced from Europe (the natives were wiped out in the last ice age), and Edwards points out that there are no guarantees that they will prosper in a particular space. “Available organic matter is the key to building up earthworm populations, but it may take several years because their time from cocoon to maturity is four to 12 months,” he says.
Working with worms that have already shown their satisfaction with your climate and soil by simply being there simplifies this challenge, but even happily naturalized earthworms will not stick around unless the soil is moist and rich in organic matter. Digging in compost between plantings coupled with heavy mulching does the trick in most climates, though many worms do head for deeper digs as the weather heats up in summer. Dotting the garden with piles of moist organic matter that are shaded by tall plants is an easy way to keep earthworms up in the root zone in hot weather.
Sweet Summer Setups
Earthworm castings are rich in plant nutrients and growth-enhancing humic acids, which the worms distribute as they move through moist soil. I like to keep a worm bin going indoors in winter, but in the summer it’s simpler to make worm compost outdoors. Here are three simple setups:
When container plants expire, dump the used potting soil in a large bucket until you have a couple of gallons. Add a dozen or so earthworms collected from your garden or compost pile, sprinkle the surface with corn meal or oatmeal, then cover with 1 inch of grass clippings. Keep the bucket in a moist, shady spot protected from rain for a month. The reconditioned potting soil (with worms removed, see “How to Herd Worms,” below) will contain enough worm castings to fertilize several needy containers.
