Your garden's best kept secret: earthworms
Garden earthworms are invaluable to your soil. They dig tunnels tirelessly to bring many benefits that aren’t easy to see from the surface:
- Their tunnels allow water and air flow deep into your soil. Plant roots can extend further along the tunnels to obtain extra minerals from your soil
- They loosen the soil and relieve areas where the soil has compacted together
- They eat organic matter and excrete worm casts which are richer in nutrients and beneficial microbes than surrounding soil. Importantly, the nutrients are in a form available to plants
- Earthworms secrete mucus to cement swallowed soil particles together in worm casts. Their casts can store water, and help your soil retain more moisture
Worm farms use only surface dwellers like red and tiger worms. Farmed to produce castings , these worms won’t survive the harsher outdoor garden settings and are unable to improve your soil.
Garden soil health
Through soil structure enhancement and nourishment from worm casts, earthworms can improve and maintain soil health, which is necessary for growing healthy plants.
Free-range earthworms eat decayed plant matter and animal manure, not the raw stuff. A superb food for them is fresh compost made from organic waste, particularly nutrient-rich kitchen scraps.
Earthworms have a natural ability to enrich soil and maintain its quality for growing healthy plants.
You can boost and maintain a robust earthworm population in your garden with quality compost. An excellent earthworm feed can be produced routinely from everyday kitchen waste. This routine is convenient with Bioverter and more challenging with traditional compost bins.