Earthworms

Earthworms

When I first moved to this house that I live in now, I really wanted to get started planting some veggies. I mean, after all, I had this big new backyard!

Well, all that excitement was diminished when I shoveled the very first shovelful of dirt and noticed it was mostly clay! Thankfully that also made me question how to fix it organically.

One thing I already knew was earthworms should be present in healthy soil. I dug around for a little while and found a few earthworms here and there but they were few and far between. At this point I knew what I had to do, I had to attract the worms. If you're trying to attract bugs or animals to your yard, the way you do that with any of them is you put the food they eat in your yard:)

Well, I found out they eat most decaying plant matter so I started gathering grasses and leaves to just dump into the clay soil. I went ahead and planted some veggies in the clay anyways because I figured when they were done growing over spring and summer I could gather what I could from the crop then chop up all the veggie clippings and return it to the soil to feed the worms.

So I waited till the end of the growing season and I took half of all the grass clippings, leaves, rabbit manure, and veggie clippings that I had been composting up until that point that I saved up over spring and summer and dug a shovel length down into that clay soil, and dumped it all in the holes I dug. When I was done adding all that compost it was about 6 inches deep! Then I took that clay soil and buried all that compost. From there, I took the other half of the compost that I saved up and added that to the top of the clay. That ended up being 6 inches deep as well.

As I dug around my yard and found more earthworms, I would take them, and throw them in that clay area.

And adding all that compost was like ringing the dinner bell:)

About three months had passed and I would go outside and uncover some of the top compost and noticed there was warms starting to come out of everywhere!! Sometimes when I would go outside at night and get close to that area I put all that compost, you could actually hear the worms moving around and eating!!

Earthworms are one of the very best composters and aerators you can find in your soil! From what I know of them they really eat lots of plant matter, and as they eat they aerate, and as they aerate they poop! It just so happens that their poop is considered to be garden gold:)

BENEFITS OF EARTHWORMS:

FERTILIZER
So, some clear benefits would be they give us the very best fertilizer!! I've read that one warm can produce 1/3 of a pound of castings per year per worm! That number is crazy if you have 100,000 worms! Just make sure to have plenty of organic material for them to eat. The castings really improve the nutrient level of the soil and with them breaking down all the compost to smaller bits, the organic material is distributed properly.

As some of you out there already know, worm castings produce phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen and lots of other nutrients that your plants can readily take up due to it being broken down.

The more humus the soil, the more worms you can have in it because they have enough food to survive.

AERATION
Earthworms are known for digging at least 7 feet deep. In all the digging they loosen and aerate the soil. That allows for oxygen to penetrate deeper, which will increase soil bacteria that contributes to overall plant health. Not only that but water will get to the roots systems of your garden plants carrying with it all the nutrients from your mulch, compost, and worm casting:)

In my humble opinion this bug is the most impotent one on the planet! They only live and thrive in organic soil, so start feeding your soil organic matter and you will reap a harvest year after year if you do not loose heart!

I don't know everything about earthworms or composting worms but I can suggest some books that I have ether read or (when I get some money up) would like to read! (FYI, when you guys buy from this site all the money made goes to giveaways for our members!)