Schlatter Family Site

Adding Earthworms
to our Garden

On 23 March 2009, we added earthworms to our garden.  Now, you may ask "Why add earthworms to your garden?"  The answer is that earthworms are one of the most important additions to any garden and lawn.  Earthworms are a sign of healthy soil -- the more worms, the better the soil.  Conversely, if you have no or very few earthworms in your soil, you do not have healthy soil.

1. Nightcrawlers:         8 to 10 inches long and the fisherman's favorite.
2. Garden Worms:       5 to 7 inches long and found commonly in damp soils.
3. Manure Worms:     4 to 5 inches long and found in manure rich soils.
4. Red Worms:             3 to 4 inches long and the most commercially available.
    

Why Earthworms in the Garden?

Earthworms live underground in tunnels that they dig throughout the soil in a network of tunnels.  These tunnels till the soil and allow air and moisture to pass easily through the soil, creating a healthy environment for plants. Tunnels retain water that the plants can take up and also hold air to help bacteria break down organic matter within the soil.

As they tunnel through the soil, earthworms eat organic material and after digesting this material, earthworms produce excrement about the size of a pin head. This excrement is called "castings" or "vermicompost" and is an excellent soil conditioning material. It improves properties of the soil such as porosity and moisture retention, aids plant growth and helps in the fight against pests and diseases.   Earthworm castings are some of the best natural organic fertilizer available.  One  earthworm produces its

Thus, earthworms help build the soil with their excrement while their tunnels soften and break up the soil, making it easier for plants to thrive.

 Our earthworms

Our soil is mainly clay with little organic matter -- it's heavy soil that retains water.  For this reason, we put our garden in raised beds and filled those beds with light, sandy topsoil and compost mixed together.  Our next step was to add earthworms.  There are few earthworms in the heavy clay, so, we purchased earthworm eggs from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm and put them into our garden soil.

We purchased 100 earthworm egg cases; each case contains about 20 earthworm eggs for a total of 2,000 worms.  Here's a photo of the earthworm eggs as they came from Uncle Jim's.

The worm eggs are in the plastic bag -- they look like green peas.  This bag contains 100 worm egg cases.  I divided the 100 egg cases proportionally among our garden beds.  I raked the soil in each bed with a lawn rake then tossed in the worm eggs one at a time, spreading them around the raised bed as evenly was I could.  I then raked a light covering of soil over the worm eggs and lightly watered the soil.  I'll check in a few days to see if we have earthworms -- the eggs are supposed to hatch within 24-48 hours.  At normal reproduction rates, these 100 earthworm egg cases will produce 32,000 worms in a year !!

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