Fortunately not the icky internal kind, but those great little wrigglers who till and enrich the soil.
A couple of years ago a friend gifted me a book, "
The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms" by local author
Amy Stewart. A wonderful treatise on the wonders of small subterranean creatures, it inspired me to add earthworms back into our tended livestock - but indoors this time. I cannot begin to tell all the amazing things earthworms do, read the book or check out this
info.) but suffice it to say, they work diligently to their own end, which conveniently helps make the planet habitable for us all.
Back when we had a lot of critters (goats, sheep, pigs, rabbits, etc.) and before we had a business, we kept a worm bin beneath our rabbit cages. One of the great symbiotic relationships of all time, of immeasurable benefit to gardeners, rabbit manure is one of the very best in the garden and one of worm's favorite habitats. The redworms we inoculated that pile with ultimately migrated on their own throughout much of our farm, and we personally introduced them to our vegetable garden where they could do the heavy work of moving nutrients and aerating the soil for us.
But that was a long time ago now, and I miss the wonderful abundance of worm castings and manure for vegetables, flowers, and houseplants. Our garden compost pile has become a happy worm habitat, and provides enough for us to use when transplanting and topdressing the garden, but I can always use more, and pure worm castings for houseplants and outdoor container plants is the best.
After looking into the many plans for home made and pre-manufactured worm bins and ultimately settled on the "Can O' Worms" recommended by Amy in her book.
We have had it going on our back porch over a year now, and we are hooked (you can get one at
Abundant Earth). The basic idea in most of these is: worms move up in their world, looking for new food as they eat the old food, and leave behind nutrient-rich castings (yup, worm poo).
Worm bins are multi level condos, and as the worms move to the top level you can remove the bottom one and empty the finished castings onto your plants, moving the empty tray to the top to continue the process. Simple.
Things we discovered...
• You can overfeed them. If you do, what you end up with is a proliferation of fruit flies (vinegar flies). Prevent this by feeding less and/or covering the scraps you feed them with a thin layer of dirt or newspaper.
(An effective fruit fly trap: place a small amount of wine, red or white, in a small jar or bowl. Cover with plastic file or? and poke a few holes in it. The holes need to be slightly bigger than you may think, say 1/16" or so. this will catch a lot of flies pronto and they die hapopily intoxicated, I think!)
• Tea bags disappear faster than anything!
• Keep them moist. The worm casting "tea" you can drain off (see spigot on Can O' Worms) is great, if smelly, fertilizer.
There are a lot of preparations concocted by we humans for the benefit of plants. The nursery carries a zillion natural and synthetic things I can buy - but the worms do this job for me providing a soil conditioner and fertilizer that cannot be beat.
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And how to clean up after getting dirty playing with your worms? Use
Simmons Soap of course!
