Benefits of Vermicomposting: The Truth Beneath the Surface

Have you ever set up a garden, placed lots of fertilizer and compost in the ground, and thought you’d have this Amazing and Bountiful harvest…only for your plants to slowly grow and barely put out blooms or produce a lower yield than you expected? Don’t feel bad, it’s happened to all of us at some point. Maybe the quality of the compost wasn’t up to snuff, maybe intense rains ran off with your hard-earned investment thanks to your soil being compacted.

What if I told you there was a way to seriously ramp up the nutrient density of your soil while solving potential issues with rain water runoff, causing you to water your garden less and gain much higher yields than you previously thought possible? As I’m sure you’ve guessed, the answer lies in the title of this article: engaging your worm drive and letting these hermaphroditic powerhouses utterly TRANSFORM your (likely) clay lawn into a topsoil-building factory that will provide you with abundant fruits, veg, and LIFE for years to come!!

Many may not know this, but there are well over 4000 species of worms on this planet! Can you believe that? Over 4000!!! They come in a veritably wide range of sizes, habitats, and diets, but this article will be solely focused on those that we like to call Earthworms. Before I get into the details of setting up simple structures to host these wonderful terraforming dynamos, I want to make a point of clarification: the worms you use to break down organic matter like compost and vegetable waste, the ones I mentioned in my previous article, Do Not eat dirt..but I will mention the other two categories of worms you should utilize that absolutely LOVE to process this rich material into a black gardening goldmine in this article, so please bear with me. These 3 categories are the composting/epigeic worms, the endogeic worms, and the anecic worms.

The main worms that many people talk about when it comes to vermicomposting live in the same realm as the epigeic worms, so why did little ol’ me distinguish the two? Well, the composting worms will go after the somewhat fresher, but not too fresh, decomposing matter in a compost heap; epigeic worms like to live among leaf litter and break down material of that nature.

Like I said, the compost worms favor food waste that’s already beginning the decomposition process…and the reason is they’re not really going after the food particles. “Whaaat?” Yes, the composting worms actually consume the bacteria and fungi that are attacking the rotting matter in the compost heap. That’s why a well-cared-for vermicompost bin doesn’t give off an off-putting smell! Did I also happen to mention that composting worms are also capable of removing contaminants from your soil?!? I didn’t find that out until just recently, while watching another YouTuber by the name of *Beansie*. She’s really awesome and very well-informed, so I’m asking you to please go check out her channel! She has a deep love of permaculture and is a very avid advocate of letting Nature work in your best interests!

The best-known species for worm bins is Eisenia fetida, AKA the Red Wiggler, because it’s renowned for its expedient efficiency in processing compostable materials into your garden’s savings account. You can find small quantities of red wigglers in places like bait shops or pet stores, but it will take a very long time for them to process the food waste and compostable paper material the average household puts out. So where do you go to get a larger stash of these garden investment bankers? You can try rooting around horse stables…and approximately have a 1 in 20 chance of finding them at no cost with a 20 in 20 chance of having an unpleasant smell associated with you in the near future. A more expedient, not to mention more sanitary, means of acquiring red wigglers would be to purchase a pound or 2 of worms from somewhere like Lazy Worms for $35/lb.

Now, you may be thinking, “Whoa! There’s no way I want to pay $35 for some worms,” but let me ask you this: how much do you pay every year for things like Miracle Gro at a big box store? All those chemical additives creating a dependency on the product to keep production up, while the ever-increasing demand for local fresh foods has yet to be fully sated. When you source composting worms from a responsible and reputable dealer, you get Many Many more worms than you’d think you’ll get; I’m talking high hundreds to over a thousand worms PER POUND! Let’s not forget that once you have your worms, they have a tendency to replicate their numbers every 90 days or so. That means if you started with about 1,000 worms (for the sake of easy math), by the time a year has passed, you’ll have close to 16,000 working for you, reducing your paper and food waste to immediately usable plant food!! Don’t you wish you could wake up, head into your garden, pick your produce straight from the vine, and have it taste like divinity-on-a-plate…not just because you grew it yourself, but because the garden soil beneath your feet is working around the clock to make sure the underground nutrients are biologically available for plant roots to uptake them? Give your pocketbook a break for the rest of your life and make a relatively small investment in yourself as well as your local worm farmers!

Speaking of soil beneath your feet, there’s the matter of the other two groups of worms you should consider employing in your garden strategy to save you from So much manual labor over time. These worms are not to be used in your compost bins because most of them would be miserable in those conditions and would more than likely die off. I will try to be as concise as I can, but this is a vitally important part of your future plans! These are the worms most people think of when they hear about earthworms, the ones that love nothing more than to turn dirt and clay into nutritionally dense and microbially-rich SOIL: the endogeic and anecic worms!

Endogeic worms, unlike the composting/epigeic variety I recently discussed, live in the upper portion of your land’s soil, usually within the first foot or so. These are the worms that will do a large amount of the ground work (pun intended) needed to take your gardening to a new level! They will make horizontal burrows throughout the area and leave their castings behind, which will help your soil absorb more water, allow roots easier passage through the soil, and provide microbes to help dirt further break down into more soil for greater nutrient bioavailability. They are usually spotted by their pale color schemes: grays, pinks, greens, and blues. Some, but not all, have the ability to deeply burrow into the soil. Good examples of an endogeic worm would be Lumbricus rubellus and Aporrectodea caliginosa, respectively the red marsh worm and angle worm, both of which can be found in topsoils.

Last, but by no means least, up to bat are the anecic worms, what you anglers out there (yes, I see you!) might call night crawlers! For those that don’t know, night crawlers like Lumbricus terrestris like to make permanent Vertical burrows that can potentially extend for several yards! These guys are like the D11T dozers of the worm world, whereas the red wigglers are more akin to a Bobcat in size. These worms can also digest leaf matter but they will take their food and drag it into their burrows, so perhaps you could also place a colony of these marvels next to an Open composting spot so they’ll have quick access to a food source while they turn your land into a small paradise. To spot if you have night crawlers on your property, you just have to look for the characteristic “middens,” which will look like a small black mound surrounding the hole. If you do not, some worm farmers have also added night crawlers into their repertoire!

Now that I’ve got all the pleasantries out of the way, it’s high time we get down to business and chat about setting up bins for your compost worms! For the most basic indoor (or covered outdoor) setup, all you honestly need is a deep plastic tote with damp, not soaking wet, bedding material. If the bedding material gets too wet, there’s a potential for harboring some bad germs and your bin will begin to seriously smell; some people will place holes near the bottom of the bin for excess moisture or leachate to run out, but most bins designed for castings won’t honestly need one, since you can add extra dry paper material (or coconut coir/peat moss) to the mix to sop up standing moisture. Your tote should have at least ½” holes drilled around the top, within a couple inches of the lip. Remember that these worms live on the surface, so they need air to breathe like we do.

Their surviving temperature range is between 40 and 80 degrees F, so they’ll need to be protected from the extreme heat and cold we’re often subjected to outside. Placing the tote in a garage, under a deck, or somewhere easily accessible indoors will suffice. As I may have mentioned before, composting worms like to feast on material that has already began to decompose, but they are NOT fans of acidic foods (they prefer to live in an alkaline-leaning environment), nor do they like decaying meaty/fatty/salty animal parts for that matter. They’ll mangia on cleaned crushed/powdered egg shells, non-acidic fruits and veg, starches, All-Purpose flour, USED coffee grounds and tea leaves, aged animal manure, and even hay/grass/compost! Straw doesn’t provide worms any nutrition, so they won’t want to eat it, but on a somewhat unrelated note you CAN use straw to grow mushrooms, if you’re so inclined. If the bin gets a little dry on top, be sure to use a non-chlorinated source of water to wet everything down.

For the worms to properly digest material, they require a fine form of grit to help break everything up. Some examples would be cornmeal, coffee grounds, as well as dried & powdered egg shells. Another possibility will be covered on my next gardening topic: charcoal, and not of the briquette variety either! I’m talking about homemade charcoal made from available biomass. Don’t worry..there’s nothing too fancy about it—literally almost anyone can do it with proper preparations made. I don’t want to give too much away, but using homemade charcoal in your garden in combination with vermicomposting has the same kind of potential as attaching a ¼” nozzle to a fire hydrant—super focused and packs a serious punch. Stay tuned to learn more!

That’s it for now! Thank you guys for taking the time to read through everything. Once again, I’d like to thank *Beansie* on YouTube as well as Alyssa Hughes from Lazy Worms on Facebook; go check them out to learn a little more about starting your own worm bin! As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated, so if you found this article interesting or informative, go ahead and like, comment, and share it with others on social media so they can learn a thing or two as well. To quote Bobbi Brown, “Work hard, but work smart; always, every day. If you want to get ahead, volunteer to do the things no one else wants to do, and do it better. Be a sponge. Be Open and Learn.”

Much love everyone, and I’ll see you guys on the next one!!