I've Got Worms!

Here they are, fresh out of their shipping package and on their way to their new home!

One of the first things I did upon moving in to my new apartment was to save one of my smaller moving boxes to start a little worm bin.  I choose a box that a regular plastic grocery bag will easily line.  I filled the bag/box about 1/3 full of organic potting soil, and then I collected a handful of clay and loam rich soil to add to the potting soil.  (That was a gift from a gopher who makes his home along the local river.)

Worms need some fine mineral soil--they ingest it and it helps their digestion.  The clay particles they ingest also supper-charge the worm castings.  It seems that the clay-humus combination excreted by worms provides many plants with exactly what they need as far as nutrition is concerned, and also as far as the delivery method.  Clay also contains cation exchange sites--which hold on to the nutrients until the microorganisms involved with the soil nutrient cycle present them with something in exchange.

There are microorganisms in the soil whose sole business is to trade nutrients they obtain from cation exchange sites with plant root hairs.  What they get in the bargain are the carbohydrates that fuel their lives.  The only source of carbohydrates, of course, are plants.  They make them from sunlight and water using nutrients they exchange with microorganism in their root hairs.

In most natural environments here in North America, this all proceeds without the help of earthworms.  There are very few earthworms indigenous to North America and they inhabit very small environmental niches.  All most all the worms we encounter here were originally from Europe. And in fact, worms are not always a welcome part of natural environments. They can disrupt indigenous soil nutrient cycles and in some areas this is threatening native plant species and the organisms that depend on them.  Just something to think about before you toss out worms leftover from fishing or before you introduce worms to your garden if you live adjacent to natural areas that do not already harbor earthworms. 

Soil nutrient cycles can do what they need to do without earthworms, but where appropriate, worms supper-charge the process!  They do their best work right in the soil of your garden, rather than in a worm bin or box.  If you haven't already, check out my article on gardening with worms here: 

Let Worms do Your Work!   You might also want to check out my related photo album on facebook: 
The Compost Hole Method.

Alas,  having recently moved into an apartment, I am no longer in a position to bury my compostables on a regular basis. Not to worry though, I do have a community garden plot in the next town, I will still be gardening and tending soil!  The only worms available locally  are night crawlers, which I really enjoy in the garden, but I have never raised them in a box before, and I wanted to stick with something familiar.  So I ordered 1/2 pound of red compost worms on-line. 

Before they arrived I made sure that their organic potting-soil-bedding was evenly moist, but not soggy.  Using a soil thermometer, I found a good spot for them in the apartment.  Sixty degrees Fahrenheit up to the high seventies is ideal.  Colder and they become sluggish, hotter and they suffer.  I found the perfect spot in my water heater closet!  Next I buried about a pint of kitchen waste in the potting soil and waited for my worms to arrive.  

Most people use shredded paper for worm bedding, and I do add some paper to my worm boxes if they start getting too damp.  However, I have found that my worms are happier, healthier, and more vigorous if their bedding is mostly chemical free natural materials, like organic potting soil and fallen leaves.  All paper has been through chemical processes and retains traces of these chemicals.  I have seen with my own eyes the difference between raising worms on paper bedding and on natural bedding.  I will stick with using a preponderance of natural material.

My current worms take about a week and a half to processes about a half a weeks worth of my kitchen waste.  I figure that eventually I will want about four times as many worms.  Living in a small apartment, this will take some creativity on my part . . .  but I am sure it can be done!

A word about smells.  A properly managed, maintained, and cared for worm box or bin has hardly any smell at all.  If I put my nose right down in the box, it has a very slight forest earth kind of scent.  If your worm box smells unpleasant, it may be too moist, too hot or cold, you may need a higher ratio of bedding to kitchen scraps, or you may need more worms or less scraps.  It is a learning process.  However there are lots of books and blogs and articles devoted to indoor "vermiposting."   Vermiposting is what composting with worms is called! Almost anyone can use this technique to recycle kitchen waste into supper-charged soil!

If you would like to leave tips, ask questions, or share useful web sites or books, please feel free to leave a comment.  I don't think Blogger will let you put a URL in comments, but you can give the names of useful websites and we can search them out!

Compost Hole Method and the possibility of rats

A friend who I introduced to the compost hole method of gardening recently asked about the possibility of it attracting rats. What follows is my answer.

As long as you have at least four inches of soil over the compostables, you shouldn't have a problem with rats. Put anything that actually smells like food in the very bottom of the hole, cover with a little dirt, then throw in the scraps that haven't been cooked, and cover with dirt. An open pile is more likely to attract rats, and those compost bin thingies are a whole other issue in themselves. If you find that you are attracting rats, even with your compost covered with four inches of dirt—you probably have a rat overpopulation problem and the poor things are dang hungry. If you have a rat problem, it is useful to reflect on natural nutrient cycles and the rats place in the food web. In nature, no nutrient is allowed to go to waste. The buildup of toxins that would happen in the environment by organic matters piling up and rotting is eliminated by creatures like rats. It is their job to clean up anything in excess, anything that might rot. However, all animals, unless they are kept in check by a predator, will reproduce to the limit of the food supply—and beyond. Basically, the rats, which may not have appropriate predators in urban environments, will keep reproducing until they begin starving. In the mean time, they are going to be eating everything that they can see or smell. If rats are digging up your compost, they are very hungry. It might be time to get a big cat, a rat terrier, or some native snakes. You need predators to keep the ecosystem in balance.

Now, about those compost bin thingies. Most commercial compost bins really are just a place to keep rotting vegetable matter. They usually aren't big enough to really get hot and truly compost, and most people just throw a bunch of wet food waste in there anyway. To truly make compost, you need a balanced combination of dry matter and wet matter—so material isn’t sodden, and a balanced ratio of carbonaceous matter (about 60%) to nitrogen rich matter (about 40%). You also need to build the pile carefully, so there is plenty of air circulation within the pile. The carefully thought out inclusion of sticks, cardboard, shredded paper, and other porous material is necessary to the healthy functioning of a compost pile. The pile needs to be about four feet by four feet, and eventually four feet high, and it needs to be carefully managed for moisture content and air pathways. (I have a book in progress called “One Day at a Time in the Garden, a Recovery Plan for the Planet.” I will be sharing tips on tending the compost pile in that book. If you start now by reading “The Complete Compost Gardening Guide,” by Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin, Story Publishing you will be well on your way to really utilizing my tips when the book comes out. The thing I don’t find adequate about the “The Complete Compost Gardening Guide,” is that they don’t address the environmental hazards of an improperly maintained compost pile—and some of their options are clearly improper. Anyway, start with their book, use the tips here, and then read my book when it comes out. In the mean time ask questions if you have any. You will soon be an expert on making and tending a healthy compost pile. {Or skip the pile entirely and use the Compost Hole Method!})

Most people are not really making compost in their bins or piles . . . they are making sludge. This sludge, as it rots, releases methane and nitrogen into the atmosphere—both are virulent green house gasses. The sludge also leaches nitrogen into the soil and potentially into ground water where it can form toxic compounds and encourage disease causing organisms. And it can travel, with the ground water, to streams and rivers where it is a pollutant which feeds alga blooms and interferes with natural ecosystems. If that wasn’t enough, the anaerobic (without oxygen) decomposition of organic matter is known to foster potential disease casing organisms, and the resultant break down compounds of this rotting sludge can also be toxic. Composting is a good thing, just make sure that what you are doing is really making compost.

The compost hole method, not only avoids releasing nitrogen and methane into the atmosphere, avoids leaching nutrients and toxins into the soil and ground water, it gets you to plant, and therefore eat fresh from the garden, year around. (At least in the places the weather allows for that.) Gardening, instead of being an event that starts and ends, becomes tied to your life. You make compostables simply by living, then you go out to the garden and reflect on what you want to plant and where the best spot is. While you do this, you observe the life of the garden and what it needs from you—as its steward. You make mental (or actual) notes about what you need to do. Then you dig a hole-- considering the roots and nutritional needs of established plants, the light and moisture needs of what you are going to plant, as well as where the plant will best contribute to the life of the garden.

Now, you put your compostables into the hole—loosely to provide plenty of air space and habitat for worms and micro-organisms. If you can see worms or sow bugs in your pile of dirt, you carefully place them on your loose compost, and cover with an inch or two of loose dirt. Next, in a perfect world, you are going to look for some dry material to layer in with the dirt. If you have pets in the house it might be time to sweep the floors to capture shed hair, if there are dried leaves or twigs around the garden you might use them. All these things contain nutrients and structure that will add food and habitat for micro-organisms to your soil. They will create pathways for roots and worms to follow, contribute to soil tilth, and to the nutrient cycle. As you layer the dirt, loosely, with dry organic matter, break up any clumps. Mound the dirt loosely over the hole. Flatten the top, and create a tiny berm around the edges. Plant a few seeds in the center and make a plant label out of a recycled take-out cup or other container. Mark the spot with a crown of sticks to keep cats and birds from disturbing your soil. Sprinkle lightly with enough water to just moisten the surface, or wait for rain. If you choose to water, do so very sparingly. You just want to keep the surface moist enough for the seeds to germinate and begin to grow. Once the plants begin to get established, they will tell you when they need more water. Within a few weeks they will sink their roots down into the moist compost, and they will probably need very little supplemental irrigation.

When you live, garden, compost, and eat in this model, you can’t help but realize that we are all part of a nutrient cycle. Do a little reading about nutrient cycles and civilizations—say Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond (published by Viking) and you will begin to realize how imperiled our nutrient cycle’s are. Our lives depend on topsoil, and commercial agriculture is destroying our top soils at very alarming rates. This brings me to mention my new power point program, “Decolonizing Soil,” which takes a look at the problem, as well as solutions we can all begin applying today. (See: http://www.biodiversegardens.com/DecolonizingSoil.html )

So, I hope this answers your questions about rats and compost—as well as giving you tips on finding more information. Eventually I will be putting some of the information in this note together for a power point presentation: “Gardening with Worms, and other Soil Building Practices,” but not today. I have other projects waiting for me today, including some compost to bury!

Here are links to more of my writing on “The Compost Hole Method,” which is not the official name of what I do, but it will work for now:
http://harvestsgardeningsecrets.blogspot.com/2006/01/simple-garden-routine-useful-for-bad.html
http://harvestsgardeningsecrets.blogspot.com/2006/07/let-worms-do-your-work.html
You will find links to even more information at the second link posted above.

Photos of the “Compost Hole Method” are available here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=124895&id=588082483&l=dc54e9c2a6
If you check out my other photo albums you will find garden shots where the plants were all grown with this method.

For direct links to the various albums see:
http://www.biodiversegardens.com/PhotoLinks

Copyright 2009 Harvest McCampbell

Let Worms do Your Work!

The lowly earthworm is really a knight in shinning armor when it comes to garden soil. They tirelessly work to improve water retention and drainage, decrease run off and erosion, aerate the soil, and improve tilth and structure. They also increase nitrogen and the bio-availability of other plant nutrients. They do all this for free and with very little help. All they ask is a safe place to live and plenty of organic matter. You can encourage worms in your garden and let them work for you. Here’s how:


Throw away your rotor-tiller:

I know this might sound sacrilegious to many gardeners, but tillers kill worms. And worms turn soil. While you are out there tilling that soil – risking injury, straining your back, and burning up expensive fossil fuel, you are killing the very creatures that will do the work for you, for free. Tilling soil encourages erosion, topsoil loss through oxidation; and the formation of hard pans. While you are loosening the top layers of the soil by tilling, you are also compacting the subsoil. Repeated tilling on the same plots eventually causes the subsoil to become impervious to water and roots. Worms on the other hand will gradually loosen and aerate all levels of the soil, recycling nutrients that have leached into the subsoil back into plants active root zones.

OK, you ask, if I can’t use my tiller, what do I do? There are many options available to home gardeners. These methods generally involve mulching with plenty of organic matter, or building raised beds. “No Till Gardening” was first made famous in 1959 by Ruth Stout in her book How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back. Fortunately for us, there is a new edition: Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy, and the Indolent, published by Lyon Press (1998). A more scientific look at no till gardening can be found in Weedless Gardening, by Lee Reich, published by Workman Publishing (2001).

Feed the Worms:

Worms like organic matter, and plenty of it. They are living creatures; they need to eat. They don’t actually live on dirt, however they do ingest plenty of common garden soil. That soil is used as grit in their digestive process, which also involves beneficial bacteria. (These bacteria fix nitrogen, improving your soil for free!) What fuels a worms metabolism is the organic matter that we burry, mix in to the soil, or use for mulch. As that organic matter begins to decompose worms work their magic.

Worms prefer freshly decomposing organic matter. That organic matter gets mixed with the grit from garden soil, beneficial bacteria, and, well, worm slime inside the worm’s gut. The worm extracts its energy and nutrition and out the other end comes what is referred to as “worm castings.” Lots of research has been done on this substance. Worm castings are high in nitrogen and nitrogen fixing bacteria, which continue to improve the soil after they have been cast. Their digestive process reduces or eliminates harmful bacteria and soil born disease organisms. The castings are also a unique chemically bound composition of mineral soil, worm slime, and organic matter. They have very beneficial effects on plant health and nutrition.

Worms deposit their castings through out the soil and at the soil surface as they go about their business tunneling and searching for food. I find that by the end of summer, any organic matter that I buried in spring has become pure worm castings. When I make my fall planting holes I use those worm castings to top dress my garden. Then I burry more organic matter for the hungry worms and plant broccoli or kale for my own dinner. Fall buried organic matter is usually not completely devoured until the following fall, but the spot can be used in summer by tucking in your plants and providing them with plenty of mulch.

"There is an entire ecosystem in a handful of soil: bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms.  Through their breeding and dying such creatures vivify the world."   Fred Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament.

Worms, worms, where are the worms?

If you don’t find several worms when sifting through a shovel full of your garden soil, you may want to purchase some to supplement those that may be hiding. The red wigglers and night crawlers available for use as fishing bait make a dynamic garden duo.

Red wigglers work the top few inches of soil, and will happily consume manure, decomposing mulch, and other organic tidbits. When temperatures turn hot, they will burrow deeper into the ground. If you have buried organic matter down where the soil stays cool, they will thrive through the summer months.

Night crawlers, when well fed, can grow to tremendous proportions. They form semi-permanent burrows and feed at the surface and on buried organic matter. They will also pull grass cuttings used as mulch down into their burrows adding more organic matter to your soil.

Between the two squiggly creatures your soil will be thoroughly cared for. Just make sure you have a shady spot with good drainage and plenty of organic matter before you hire them on. They will multiply and spread through out your garden with very little effort on your part.


More Benefits:

Besides saving your back, and improving plant nutrition, worms benefit the soil in many ways. The very slime that glues the organic matter to the mineral soil in worm castings prevents erosion and top soil loss. This glue reduces the ability of the soil to dissolve in water and get washed away by normal irrigation. The granular nature of the castings reduces the soils tendency to turn to dust and get blown away. The physical structure of the castings also benefits plant roots. Worm castings resist compaction (unless you work at it). The spaces between the castings provide room for air and moisture in the soil. And the loose structure of the castings are easily colonized by plant roots.

Worms are wonderful. They improve the soil both nutritionally and structurally. If we let them, they reduce the work of gardening immensely. They are out there right now, waiting to go to work for you.
More info:

For more information see the following articles from my blog:
A Simple Garden Routine - useful for bad backs, no time, short budgets – this article tells in detail exactly how to garden for and with the worms.

If you missed the article on organic matter, Nurture Your Soil for Free, you can read it here: http://harvestsgardeningsecrets.blogspot.com/2006/05/nurture-your-soil-for-free.html

You can also use the search function in the upper left corner of this blog to find more information on worms, soil, and organic matter: http://harvestsgardeningsecrets.blogspot.com/

For the low down on the research related to worms and gardens check out this site:
http://mypeoplepc.com/members/arbra/bbb/id19.html




Copyright 2006 Harvest McCampbell, from my column "Digging the Dirt," published in The Hoopa Valley People Newspaper, June 20, 2006. Posted here with permission.


Updated with a book quote and minor editing on 11/17.16.  Text and photo copyright Harvest McCampbell.  Please feel free to use the buttons below to share.  All other rights reserved.