If you have a homestead, farm or just a backyard garden, you know everything depends on your soil. Good soil equals good plants and a healthy garden. Instead of adding a bunch of fertilizers, herbicides to kill the weeds and other harmful and nasty chemicals, there is a simpler, natural and cheaper option.
A good, organic and natural compost is just about the best way to improve your soil quality. Compost adds natural nutrients without resorting to any chemical fertilizers or other potentially harmful additives. One of the best producers of good, natural compost that your garden plants will just love is worms.
In this article, I’m not going through the steps in starting a worm bed, or vermiculture. I’m just going to point out some of the benefits your garden and your wallet will enjoy by adding worms and worm compost – or vermicompost – to your gardening kit bag.
Worms will naturally thrive in healthy soil. They are part of the foundation of a solid permaculture farm or garden. If worms are absent in your garden soil, there is probably something amiss that is keeping them out. Not to worry, you can cheaply and easily begin composting with worms in a container and improve your soil quality by adding the compost to improve your soil quality.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re briefly going to touch on six benefits of composting with worms (vermiculture).
- It’s cheap. Using worms to make compost and then using that compost is way cheaper than adding chemical fertilizers or other chemicals. After initial setup, worms cost practically nothing.
- It will keep your plants healthy. Worm compost will protect plants from a variety of common diseases. Also, it won’t burn your plants or their roots like many chemical additives.
- It doesn’t stink. Worm compost will smell like rich soil. It doesn’t stink like manure might so your worm bed can actually be inside and it won’t reek like you might think it would.
- Raising worms will reduce your household and yard wastes. The basic medium and food for worms are your vegetable scraps, dry leaves from your yard, sawdust and even your used coffee grounds. See image below from thespruce.com:
5. Worming is completely natural. When raising worms for compost, it harnesses nature to create something that is super beneficial to your garden. No harmful chemicals, insecticides or fertilizers.
6. Better soil means better veggies. Vermicomposting will produce better, bigger and healthier plants and vegetables. Naturally.
If you’re moving the soil in your garden to plant and there are a good quantity of worms, that is a sure sign of a healthy ecosystem, critical to any natural permaculture gardener. Those worms are hard at work improving your land. Studies have shown that worms can move 15 tons of soil per acre! That means they are eating the vegetable matter and filling your soil with awesome compost.
If you don’t see those worms in your garden already, you can start raising them to create the compost you need. To achieve all the benefits listed above, and more, you can start as small as using 5-gallon buckets or a small plastic bin.
Worms reproduce very quickly. Starting with just a few and if they are properly fed and cared for, you’ll have hundreds or thousands of these squirmy little composting machines working overtime to improve your garden in no time flat.
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