The Importance of Worms in your Home Vegetable Garden

Red Wigglers (Eisenia foetida)

You can do many things to and for your home vegetable garden to make it easier on yourself to maintain. Such things include a sprinkler system for watering and mulches for weed prevention. 

With that said there is one creature that you and your garden should not be without for such maintenance, and that is the worm. Well worms, plural, to be exact.

Worms provide a plethora of benefits. For instance, as they move about your soil they will consume a variety of things from organic matter, to the clay, silt and so on, and in turn give you castings. These castings, also called vermicompost, are filled with some of the greatest nutrients your plants will need to grow.

Besides the nutrients the castings provide for your soil and your plants, they are also good for making your soil more granular (more crumbly), which helps improve your soil's structure allowing air and water to move more freely. As worms move around your soil, they also create tunnels.  These tunnels help aerate the soil underneath, and that is beneficial to plant roots, giving them a looser soil to grow and expand. "Soil that has been well worked by worms can take in water four times faster than soil that hasn't," writes Edward C. Smith, in his book The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.  "This reduces runoff and prevents water loss through evaporation from puddles that form when soil cannot absorb rainfall quickly enough." To see if your soil has enough worms you can do a simple worm count by digging an area in your garden, one foot wide by one foot long by a half foot deep.  Turn the soil over and look for worms.  If you don't find any, your soil has issues.  You are looking for more than a dozen worms in that sized area that you dug up. Don't panic if you don't find any or less than a dozen, it just means you have some work to do, to create an environment that is suitable for them.  Adding in plenty of organic matter (i.e. grass clippings, leaves, coffee grinds, egg shells etc.) will go a long way to building a healthy worm population.  This will take some time and you must be consistent, because as soon as you stop feeding the worms, they are out of there.  You can speed this process up a little bit by purchasing some red wigglers and adding them to your soil.  Even if you purchase the worms and add them in, you will still need to add organic matter to the soil to keep feeding them, otherwise they will leave as well.   As long as you keep adding organic matter to your soil, you will be fine.

About the Author 
Mike Podlesny is the author of Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A Guide to Vegetable Gardening for the rest of us. Be sure to join Mike`s vegetable seeds mailing list.

Watch the video below to learn more about Mike`s Seeds of the Month Club:

Vermicomposting for Better Soil

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Vermicompost is merely nothing more than worm castings after you have fed them a diet of organic material. It is one of the best forms of fertilizer you can add to your garden. So good that many home vegetable gardeners have created worm farms and vermicompost bins in their own back yards, sheds, garages and basements. It is easy to do and fairly inexpensive. As with anything, the more work you put into it the less it will cost.

To get a better understanding of vermicomposting and what it could mean for your home vegetable garden I turned to Justen Garrity, the President of Veteran Compost. Justen operates a commercial worm composting facility in Maryland with over a half million worms.

Benefits
Just like with other forms of composting, vermicompost is an easy, environmentally friendly, and in many cases, a fun way to create much needed nutrients for your soil. Justen says, “Instead of sending your fruit/vegetable scraps, shredded paper and newspapers to landfills, you can use worms to recycle that material into worm castings.” Worm castings are a great way to help reduce the affect of diseases on plants, rejuvenates the soil by adding nutrients and assists with plant growth.

Worm Species
If you were to look into a science book specifically on worms, you will see that there are literally thousands to choose from, although many are more than likely, not available in your area. “The best worms are the red wigglers,” says Justen. “ They have evolved over millions of years to become nature’s best worm for eating organic waste.”

Cost
So how much does it cost to run a worm farm at home? Depends really on how much you want to spend. “Expect to pay about $20 to $30 for a pound of worms,” Says Justen. As for housing you can spend $80 for the Worm Factory DS3GT 3-Tray Worm Composter or build your own for under $15 with nothing more than a plastic bin, a drill and some time.

Worm Population
If you feed your worms a nice healthy diet of organic material, i.e. your food leftovers, leaves, grass etc., you can expect your worm population to double about every 90 days. So what do you do with all of those worms? “Red Wigglers will self-regulate their population based on the size of the bin, the amount of food, the moisture level and temperature,” says Justen. “You don’t have to worry about a rapidly growing population taking over your house.” However, if you do feel like you have too many worms, Justen recommends that you simply remove them and share with some friends, other gardeners and fisherman.

Happy Vermicomposting!

About the Author
Mike Podlesny is the author of Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A Guide to Vegetable Gardening for the rest of us and the administrator for the largest vegetable gardening page on Facebook.

Watch the video below to learn more about Mike`s Seeds of the Month Club: