What if I told you that adding worms to your soil isn't really going to do much
of anything, especially if you're doing it to improve lifeless dead soil.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb.
I get a lot of questions about adding worms into a raised bed, into containers,
this sort of thing. Probably because I've done a lot with the Urban Worm Bag,
my vermicomposting system of choice. Now the answer is twofold.
We're going to go into it because you need to understand soil and soil life a
little bit more to know why just willy-nilly adding worms into your systems
might not be a good idea. So without further ado,
cultivate that Like button and I will personally fly to your home and improve
the soil with my own two hands. And let's get into the video.
The first and most important thing to understand is that your soil is not dead
and lifeless because it doesn't have worms.
It doesn't have worms because it's dead and lifeless.
So you can't solve it by just putting life IN. So how do you solve it?
The first thing we have to understand is what soil actually is,
which I think is confusing to both myself when I started out,
but also a lot of gardeners. Cause you think of it as one thing,
whereas it's sort of a catch all term for a condition of matter itself,
if you want to get that nerdy about it. So soil,
in general you have roughly 45% inorganic matter,
which we'll get to in a second, 25% water,
25% air and then 5% organic matter. So that 45%,
the inorganic matter, what is that actually comprised of? Well,
that's where you hear some of these terms that most of us are familiar with -
clay soil, silty soil, sandy soil.
Those are your basic inorganic particles that make up a soil mix.
So you've got clay at the smallest particle size, then silt, and then sand.
And I've got some videos on the channel about how to know what style of soil
that you have. But that's 45%,
that's almost half of what makes up a soil are these inorganic components.
Now in a perfect world, you have a somewhat equivalent blend of those three,
which we call a loamy soil.
There's a handy little soil triangle I'll put up on the screen right now that
shows you all of the different combinations you can have based on the different
weightings of inorganic particles in your soil.
But that brings us into our next components of a good soil.
So the most important component to a soil that's going to produce for you,
and why adding worms isn't a good idea,
and instead doing what we're going to get into is a good idea,
is that 5% - that organic matter.
And organic matter is things that once were alive that now are not,
or technically still could be. A bug in your soil is still organic matter,
even if it's still alive. But what we think about is dead or decaying material,
things like wood chips, straw, fallen leaves, old plant matter.
That 5% is really what makes up most of what we call a good healthy
soil. Cause without that five it's dead and it's lifeless.
So this brings us to reason number one why just adding worms in is not a good
idea. Because number one, if it's lifeless soil,
chances are that the organic matter content is pretty low,
which means that the worms aren't going to have a lot to eat,
which means they're not going to survive.
So you're just going to add them in and then they're going to die. Now,
the second reason is actually more important.
Reason number two is because you're starting too high in the food chain so to
speak. What you need is that organic matter, number one, that's your base layer.
You need food for everything that's alive in soil to eat.
It all wants organic matter. So if you don't have that,
you don't have anything up the food chain inside your soil. First of all,
you won't have a lot of bacteria.
You won't have a lot of fungi if it's completely devoid of organic matter.
Without those two, you don't have the protozoa, you don't have the nematodes,
you don't have all those sort of arthropods.
And of course you don't have the worms.
If you think about the scale of life within your soil, worms are pretty high up.
We can see them with the human eye. They're quite large. We can handle them.
Those are really high up.
And so when you're talking about bringing a soil back to life,
you want to start at the bottom and work your way up.
And what's really interesting is it even ties into what's above the soil,
what's around you.
You can see that some of the last things to come back are those largest
organisms in a system. So when you add the organic matter into your soil,
then you'll get the bacteria, then you'll get the arthropods, the nematodes,
the protozoa, those sorts of things. You'll get your fungal life back.
And worms eat pretty much all of that. But without that,
they're not there and they don't eat anything.
And so you can see why the presence of worms is indicative that your soil is
healthy, but you cannot fix soil by adding worms in. So what should you do?
Those of you who have been paying attention know that the answer is to add more
organic matter into your soil.
And there's a lot of different ways that you can do that,
some of which we've covered here on the channel.
I have a video on different ways that you can compost,
no matter what sort of scale you're living in - from apartments all the way to a
homestead like the one I'm at now, that you can check out.
But compost of any kind is fantastic.
I'll get into one in a second that's my favorite that still has to do with
worms. But you can also add fallen leaves.
If you're watching this video at the time it comes out, it's fall.
It's a great time to put fall leaves into your garden.
And worms really seem to like living under that fall leaf litter.
You can add cardboard, you can sheet mulch, you can add straw.
Just really anything that once was alive that's kind of nicely broken up,
add to your soil. You'll start to see everything come back.
And then yeah, if you want to boost the population, sure,
add some earthworms in there. And specifically add earthworms.
You don't want to add composting worms,
which I'll show you in the system over here.
If you still want to interact with worms while you're waiting for them to come
back into your raised beds or into your garden soil,
then worm composting is a great way to use worms and create that organic matter
to add back in. Now,
one thing I'll say is you use a different style of worms in a system like this,
this is the Urban Worm Bag, which I've got for sale on the store.
It is a red wiggler worm typically in here, that's an epigeic worm.
It's a surface style worm, likes to hang out in the top layers.
What we typically want in our garden beds is the worms that are naturally there.
They're more of a digging subsurface dwelling style worm.
So even if you were to ignore all the things I just said, and you're like,
you know what? I'm still gonna put worms in my raised beds.
If you use something like a composting worm,
it's going to be sitting up near the top and it's going to be way too expensive,
especially right now.
I mean the price per pound of worms for composting is somewhere around 35, 45.
Bucks. Too much, way too much!
You could buy a couple bags of compost for that,
and then just put it in your beds and let the worms come back themselves.
So if you want to get into worm composting, you can check out the link for this.
But until next time, good luck in the garden, exercise some patience.
And keep on growing.