Hi and welcome. Today we’re talking about Vermicomposting. We’re not going to get into how to. We’ll do that in another article. In this one, we’re just going to talk about what is Vermicomposting and the benefits that it can have on your garden. So we already know what composting is. So we know composting is basically just decomposition underneath the right conditions, and it gives us compost which gardeners refer to as Black Gold.

Well I’m gonna tell you about something that I think is gold, gold, or whatever color gold. You want to call it just as good as the regular old. Now this is probably my favorite type of fertilizer slash amendment to throw into my garden and I’ve always had the best results with this and homemade chicken manure, but we’ll talk about the chicken manure in another article. So what exactly is vermicomosting? Vermicomosting is simply using worms to break down organic matter. Now the byproduct of vermin composting is the vermicompost or the worm compost. I don’t really like to call it worm castings because if we maintain our worm bin, whether indoor or outdoor, if we maintain that bin in a proper condition, then we’re getting more than just castings. This is a whole ecosystem, so I refer to it as VermiCompost.

Put a little bit of respect on their name, you know, put some respect on the worm poop name. Now when I say worms, I’m not talking about the worms that we probably all dug up in our garden when we were kids, and even now those are just regular earthworms. I’m talking about using specific type of worms to do this type of composting work. Now the worm that people most associate with Vermi composting are the red wiggled worms.

They’re really small, they’re small worms, they’re bright red, and they can consume a lot of organic matter. They can eat more than half of their body weight in organic matter per day. Now, just because they can eat up to half their body weight, hat does not mean they do that. Oftentimes they’ll just eat up to about 25 percent of their body weight per day.

Now if you calculate that times how many worms you potentially could have in your worms bin, then you really understand that you can actually compost a lot of food or many pounds of food weekly, since there are over 9 thousand different worm species. Let’s not act like Red Wiggles are the only type of worms that you can use for composting. I’ve successfully used the African Nightcrawlers, the Canadian Nightcrawlers.

I think I’ve even tried to use those Alabama jumpers and they worked somewhat well, but I’ve had the best success with the Red Wiggles and probably I think it was the European Nightcrawlers that I’ve purchased.

What’s cool about these worms is that yes, you can go and purchase them, but you can also set up kind of like worm traps in your yard to catch these word worms. Or a better place to get them is, if you know, anybody who has horses go out to their horse manure patch or their big pile of horse manure that they have, and you can just put a glove on, of course, and then dig around in that pile and you should be able to pull pounds of these worms from this horse manure. As a matter of fact, i went and tried to do it a couple days ago, but the first place I went to, they had too many shavings in their horse manure. So there weren’t a lot of worms. But, I’m going to continue. I’m gonna continue, the Mission, digging through horse poop to go and find these worms.

So we said that these worms will eat our organic matter, including our kitchen scraps, and they will break it down. But we cannot give them everything to break down. This is where Vermicomposting differentiates from something like Bokashi composting because in Bokashi composting we can throw everything into our bucket, sprinkle our inoculated brand on top and let it sit back and do its thing. With this Vermin composting we have to pay more attention to what we actually add to the bin. So our kitchen food scraps are safe. Now think about our anytime you’re using any sort of vegetables or anything. All of the vegetable scraps are good, your coffee filters are good. Even the tea bags are good as well. Bread bagels. Things like that. Those are all good to go in our Vermicomposting bin.
We need to avoid things like dairy, we need to put minimal amounts of citrus into our bin. We need to avoid meat whether it’s cooked or uncooked. We need to avoid putting bones of any sort into our composting bin, and you should not put fresh animal manure into your bin. You can and what I recommend is getting your fresh manure, letting it sit and break down for a little bit and then adding that into your bin. If we put manure that’s fresh from the animals, fresh from the pile into our bin and it hasn’t had any time to compost, what ends up happening is very similar to what happens if we were to apply this manure onto the plants, we would burn the plants, potentially killing the plants well. If we throw it into our vermicomposting bin, what we end up actually doing is altering the conditions of the bin. Maybe we make it to acidic and then we end up killing our worms or our worms try to crawl out of the side and they want to escape.

So who is vermicomposting for who can vermicompost? Really, it’s for everybody. I think of it as an additional way of composting. You can make verrmicompost inside of your apartment, you can do it outside. You can make large wooden beds. I mean there’s many different options, so vermicomposting works well for urban gardeners. People with small gardening spaces maybe even just balcony gardens. If you have an apartment and you have a bunch of house plants, you don’t have any outdoor space.

Harvest your vermin compost and throw it on all of your house plants and I guarantee you you’ll have the best houseplants on Instagram. Vermicompost is also dope for anybody who was new to composting.

I think it is less intimidating than barrel composting or large piles of compost that people have in their yards. I think it’s a way to just get started, get your feet wet and see the benefits of composting, and it’s cool to just watch. I also think vermicomposting is great for anybody who has kids and they want to introduce their kids to gardening. Kids are fascinated by the fact that you can throw your food scraps into a bin and watch the worms form this ball around your food scraps. They love it, i love it, it’s cool to do. So now we’re gonna talk about the benefits of worm castings and why everybody should be vermicomposting.

Castings contain concentrated amounts of calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, and this is readily available, meaning that as soon as we throw it into our pots, as soon as we add it into our garden, throw a little bit of water on top, boom. That stuff is already there and readily available for our plants to absorb it. Another benefit of using castings is that they are a slow release, fertilizer or amendment.

Start off the season, throw your worm castings in before you start planting. Allow them to break down and that one application of worm castings can feed and amend your soil for six plus months. Another benefit of using vermicompost in our garden is using vermicompost in our garden will vastly improve the soil structure, and that is because of all of the microorganisms within the vermin compost like humans, any animals gut is full of bacteria, good and bad bacteria.
So with worm castings as they eat our food scraps and the food scraps work their way through the worm’s body. At some point in time they pass through their gut and when it works its way through its gut all of this food scraps they get basically inoculated with all sorts of microorganisms. Now these microbes work their way out in the form of castings and into our vermicompost and we all know that once we increase the amount of healthy, strong microorganisms within our soil, we also increase and improve our soil. And once we increase the strength and the size of our soil, you will notice a drastic improvement in the health of all of your plants. Something else that’s dope about vermicompost is that it acts as the perfect soil conditioner and when we throw this vermicompost into our garden, it helps balance out levels between our minerals and our nutrients within the soil. By adding vermicompost to our garden, we are also helping to increase the production rates for all flowers, fruits and vegetables.

Before I let you go. I need you to do more than one thing. First. I need you to share this article with your friends. Second. I need you to tell a friend or two about the article if you enjoyed it. Thank you for reading and happy gardening.