Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Harvey Ussery <boxwood@nelsoncable.com>]

My responses to Deiter's post interspersed below:

> Here is the opposing argument:
>    
>   According to a calculation I read the other day, 200 to 400 earthworms can live
>   in 1 square meter of good garden soil, supposing further that each worm can 
>   produce its own weight of high quality compost each day, this translates into 
>   about 1 cm of compost over the entire surface or about 50 truck loads of high 
>   quality compost per hectare (about 2.5 acres) a year.  Try to make this amount 
>   of compost in your vermiculture facility! 
>   

True. Every gardening activity should in some way be directed toward 
increasing earthworm activity/proliferation in the soil. These really 
are among our hardest working allies.

Still, there are advantages to vermiculture for processing manure as a 
separate operation. The production of worm castings thru soil-building 
practices is a general fertility application. The castings from a 
vermicomposting bin can be used for making more specific, targeted 
fertility applications. They can also be used as a major ingredient of 
seedling starting mixes. And as said in one of my earlier posts, worms 
raised in a bin can be harvested and fed to poultry (or pigs).


>   If on the other hand, you raise earthworms in a box to liberate them in the 
>   garden, the earthworms raised on a high nutrient diet in the box may not do
>   very well when left to their own devices in the wild.
>   

The idea behind vermicomposting is not to "liberate" the bin worms into 
the garden's soil. The species used in the bins (usually Eisenia 
foetida) specialize in nutrient-dense organic heaps like manure 
piles--they do *not* burrow into the soil or long survive outside such 
dense organic residues. Most vermiculturists adopt some strategy for 
retaining the worm population in the bin when taking the castings for 
fertility applications.


>    
>   What I mean is that it may be more advantageous to create the right conditions
>   in the garden or in the field for earthworms to prosper and multiply rather 
> than to
>   raise a few in a box.
>   

Why not do both?

~Harvey

--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us

"How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."  
~Wendell Berry