I am often up to my elbows in culture, vermiculture, or to be more accurate vermicompost, often delicately described as worm castings, but the technical term is worm shit. And what wonderful, gloriously crumbly life-giving shit it is.
After retiring, just before the absurd but sinister Covid hysteria, when my travelling life was replaced by a home-based one, I took up gardening, but soon found I was spending large amounts on compost. So, being a cheapskate married to a very frugal wife, who tightly controls the purse-strings, I then took up composting. I now have four regular compost heaps, made a cheap hot composting bin and took up bokashi composting. In all but the latter I found that the resulting compost was always full of little red worms, which just seemed to arrive. I started wondering who they were, and what they were doing.
It turns out that they were doing a lot of good, turning garden and kitchen waste into probably the best compost you can get. I found that you can even buy the stuff – and here’s a an add selling 2ltr of it for more than £22!. I then looked a little further and found that you can buy a bottle of worms, start a colony and harvest its crap. So I did.
You can easily make your own bins, but for various reasons I decided to buy mine, getting a tiered four bin system as shown here. This makes harvesting much easier. The site linked also gives detailed advice.
Next of course, you need your worms. But the worms you want are not common or garden earthworms, so I bought a pound of them, approximately 1,000 worms, delightfully name Red Wrigglers (Eisenia fetida) mostly, but with a few Tigers and European Night Crawlers chucked in for diversity (the only instance of DEI in the Armstrong household). These worms have a lifespan of about two years, so I’m on the third generation of the little blighters now, thousands of ‘em.
And they are surprisingly entertaining. I like the way they instantly disappear when you open the lid to their bin – they are sensitive to light - and a worm ball is a thing of great joy, both to me and the worms. They are hermaphrodites and have both male and female sexual organs, and while they can’t have sex with themselves, both sets of organs can be busy at the same time, so a worm ball is a wriggling, writhing ball of organic orgasmic joy.
And all that makes them hungry, and boy can they eat. Each worm can eat up to half its own body weight every day! And they’ll eat more or less anything, though for the health of the bin it’s best not to use acidic stuff like oranges and lemons, cook or processed food, dairy products or meat, which might attract vermin.
Fortunately, Mrs A (ZYY) cooks pretty much from scratch, so we have a good supply of stuff like tatie peelings, plus carrot, bits of spinach and stuff from the kitchen. My worms love the soft inside of pumpkins, which I grow every year now, bananas and sweet corn. As worms (which five hearts) have gizzards like chickens, they grind their food as it passes through them, so they need grit. The best source of this is ground and powdered eggshells. They also get the odd treat of a little comfrey, nettle and some leaves and weeds, together with a small handful of bacteria-laden compost.
They also need somewhere to live; ‘bedding’. I kill two birds with one stone here and use the coir I use for my micro-greens after the greens have been cut, leaving the stalks and roots behind. They can both use this for bedding and eat it!
Worms are well over 90% water, so don’t like extremes of temperature. I keep my bin in my shed, out of direct sunlight, which can boil them. In the winter, unless you like snap, crackle and pop crispy worms, it’s necessary to keep them above five, preferably seven Celsius. I insulate their bin with old bubble wrap, curtains and a jumper. My little pooping pets also have a hot water bottle I put under the insulation if it looks like getting too cold.
Worms like it moist, but I find that there is enough moisture in the foods I put in the bin for their needs. I also cover their food and bedding with a sheet of damp cardboard (they like it corrugated) which helps keep the moisture in. Moisture slowly drains down to the bottom of the bin, where there is a drain cock, which I leave open. The resulting liquid, sometimes referred to as worm wee, can be used as a liquid fertiliser.
You can keep the bins inside, but there is no chance of ZYY agreeing to that, so in the shed they went. When you first get them, it’s best to buy a bit of the bedding and food they are used to so that they can get used to their new home. I did this but even so, I thought that they had sent Houdini worms instead of Red Wrigglers, as they were all escapologists. I solved that by shining a bright light on the bin, which kept them from trying to escape. Now it’s just the rare individualist that ventures outside, rarely. The rest conform, and stay put.
It takes about three to four months for a tray to be ‘converted’ depending on temperature. The worms, who self-regulate their population according to food supply, are noticeably busier between April and October. I usually just harvest the bottom tray once the top tray is full, and this seems to work well. All that ‘s left to do is to spread on your beds. It can go right up to a plant as it will not burn, and you can use as much as you like.
So what does this harvest of worm shit – black gold it’s often called -do? Basically, the worms convert organic waste into nutrient-rich compost that enhances soil health and fertility. It also enhances soil structure, water retention, and nutrient availability. It contains essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, as well as beneficial microorganisms that promote plant growth. Plants grown in vermicast-enriched soil exhibit increased resistance to pests and diseases as the presence of beneficial microbes and enzymes in vermicast enhances plant immunity and overall health.
So, I hope you re tempted. If you are, please let me know and contact me if you want further information. Happy worming!