Red hybrid earthworms.
Each one ingests its weight in organic matter every 24 hours, and excretes highly nutritious fertilizer called castings. These castings are the most perfect plant food known to man and contain 5 times the available nitrogen, 7 times the available phosphorus, 7 times the exchangable magnesium, 11 times the available potash and 1.5 times more calcium than 4 inches of good topsoil. Castings do not heat and will not burn plants. Like I said, black gold.
I’d like to get a bag of Black Gold as well! I wonder if it will smell different to the dogs… I’d hate for the expensive castings to end up eaten rather than used as plant food….
Great looking cast producers!
If we had a decent body of water in the area, I’d be “gone fishing”!
[…] pot. If you add vermicompost you’ll really boost your seedlings. Check out the posting “Say Hello To My New Little Friends” to see why worm castings are so wonderful for your plants. You can purchase worm castings, but I […]
Say goodbye to my new little friends…It seems the happy little redworms brought friends of their own. Red spider mites. Nasty little critters that spread like wildfire. Now, I’m gonna have to take drastic measures. The worms gotta go, and the mites gotta die. If I knew of a way to kill the mites and let the worms live, I’d do it. Just can’t think of a way. If anyone has any ideas, I could really use the help.
Seems like I have a haven for spider mites. I’ve been trying to eradicate them from my garden all year, (and Mealy bugs….can’t forget the mealy bugs). I used Pyola, perhaps an insecticidal soap? This is a battle I’m not winning well. My thinking now is to remove all plants entirely from the infected area, but that means I’ve gotta pull up my watermelon and Itty’s hibiscus. Drat it all.
Found a home for the worms. Ritchie Coenen will take them. He said he has done some research on the mites, and these are a special mite that cohabit with the worms. They don’t hurt each other and you can only keep the population down by doing some tricks, like putting a food in at night that the mites LOVE, so the next day you remove it and with it the majority of the mites. Uhgg.
So, another experiment gone awry. At least they don’t have to die. Ritchie will give them a good home. I’ll just keep on purchasing the black gold castings until I can find a way to make my garden a happy home for worms that can live there. Sigh….
Hey, I would like to know if Richie has saved the worms from the mits!?
I would too, he said he’d figure out a way. Jennifer is working on a solution too, for her worms. Maybe she’ll post what she is doing and how it works.
I read one solution on the internet that included the use of a blow torch. Hmmm, sounded a bit drastic to me. I did, however, pass the information on to Ritchie and Jennifer, just to see if there were any takers.