Vermiculture Growing

Vermiculture Growing: "Vermicomposting: using red wiggler worms (E. foetida) to decompose plant wastes into castings.

Why Use Vermiculture?

Worms are good for the garden soil for many reasons. Unparalleled as soil excavators, earthworms spend their lives ingesting, grinding, digesting and excreting soil--as much as 15 tons per acre goes through earthworms bodies in a year. These 'worm castings' are richer in nutrients and bacteria than the surrounding soil. Their underground burrows also create channels in the soils, which makes the soil more porous, allowing water to move to greater depths in the soil column. Worm burrows also allows for drainage after heavy rains reducing erosion.

Worms also help plants grow better. Plant roots require oxygen and worm burrows provide passages for air to get next to the roots deep within the ground. This is called aeration, analogous to what homeowners often do to turf lawn with heavy machinery. It should be noted that these deep tunneling worms also bring subsoil closer to the surface, mixing it with topsoil that has more organic matter.

Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen, which is an important plant food. The sticky slime helps to hold clusters of soil particles together in formations called 'aggregates.' Soil aggregates (clumps) lying next to each other permit air to move between the spaces."

Worm Bed Garden

Worm Bed Garden: "As much as I am a die-hard worm composting fanatic, I have always considered it as one “piece of the puzzle” in terms of creating sustainable systems - and oh, what an amazing little piece of the puzzle it IS!
:-)

I remember coming across a fascinating video online a number of years ago. Unfortunately I was never able to track it down again after that. It featured a ‘living machine’ system, containing a series of stages that all fed (literally) off one another - the waste of one stage essentially became the ‘food’ for another. It set up by Dr John Todd, a personal hero of mine who has been involved in this type of work for many years (he was one of the founding members of the New Alchemists back in the early ’70s)"

Farm Compost

Farm Compost: "It may seem ironic that the very animals you may produce your worms for would also be the predators you have to protect your worm farm from. If you just give the worms away to the predators, there isn't much point in trying to raise them for profit by selling them to the people or businesses that use them to feed the very same types of predators!

You must keep other things from harming your worm farm, of course. One of those things is the medication residue that is left in the manure you may get from livestock farms to feed your worms. Allowing children unsupervised access to your worm farm could be hazardous for your worms."