Tag Archives: earthworm castings

Grow bigger healthier vegetables w/ worm castings

11 May

Last Spring was the first time my parents used worm castings exclusively to fertilize their garden.  My mom and dad claimed their best tomato crop they can remember. We used a handful of castings with each tomato seedling, and the results were terrific.  Even in one of the driest and hottest years on record, the taste, yield, and size of the tomatoes were outstanding.

Worm castings or earthworm manure is the best all natural fertilizer you can get.  Beyond Potassium and Nitrogen, worm castings are alive with beneficial microbes.  Beneficial bacteria, nematodes, and other tiny beneficials that will add life to plants and soil.  You can maximize your castings harvest by brewing compost tea.   You will need an aquarium pump, water, castings, and some unsulfured molasses to amplify the effects.  Worm castings are the only manure that can be directly absorbed by plants roots.  They are perfectly pH balanced and won’t burn up plants like other high in Nitrogen manures.

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Benefits of Worm Castings

20 Jul

Benefits of Worms and their castings have long been known, and here is one example from Thomas J. Barrett”s Harnessing The Earthworm.

In a full-column article entitled “Earthworms in Role of

Great Benefactors of the Human Race,” Mr. W. A. Anderson,

Editor of the South Pasadena Review, reported a number of

growth experiments by the author.* One of the experiments reported

on was this: We planted three boxes of lawn grass (poa

trivialis}. One box of good native soil as control; one box of

identical soil, but with earthworms added ; one box of pure earth worm

castings. After germination and sixty days’ growth, the

grass was harvested and the results carefully compared. All

boxes produced good crops of grass. The box of native soil, with

earthworms added, yielded 271 percent more than the control box

without worms. The box of earthworm castings yielded 463 percent

more than the control box without earthworms.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Texas Worm Harvester (part 3)

8 Feb

The sun was shining and the arctic blast of 2011 broke this weekend for the first run of the Texas Worm Harvester.  I ran a couple hundred pounds of compost through the rig and had some good results.  I had enough time to run a few of my red worm bins with the same success.  I put together a fairly rough video of the project, and welcome any questions.  Let me know if I can help you with your very own version.