So this brings me to a valid point of shipping worm castings in extreme heat but more importantly cold winter temperatures.

The cargo holds on planes and the trucks utilized for transporting the worm castings are not heated or air conditioned hence are reliant on the ambient temperature at the time they are being shipped. It does not take long for the water content in worm castings to freeze hence killing off the beneficial aerobic microbes as well. The castings do not even need to freeze but rather drop to low in temperature will make them useless.

I always forget or become distracted to write this article however when shipping or purchasing worm castings it is vital for maximum potential that they be shipped with heat packs. Here at Organic Worm Farm, we ship all our worm castings with a 72 hour heat pack being Priority Mail is a two to three day service.

So if you are shipping worm castings, be sure they are in a breathable bag and you include a 72 hour heat pack. If you are looking to purchase worm castings, be sure to do so from a reputable worm farm that treats your worm castings as if they were for their own personal use!

Whether it is your rose bushes, your favorite fruit trees, or other plants, it is important to use worm castings early in the fall while the plants are still green. Once they go dormant, they will not be able to utilize the nutrients effectively!

By adding worm castings now, you are enabling your plants to feed aggressively, much like a bear preparing for the long winter before hibernation, hence giving them the added boost not only to survive the long winter months but to thrive in early spring as well.

For smaller plants and shrubs it is best to pull away any mulch and sprinkle a cup to four cups of worm castings (depending on the size of the plant) before covering up with the mulch again. For larger plants such as fruit trees, it is best to pull away any mulch from the drip line (outer edges of the branches where the rain drips off the tree) and pour worm castings directly under the drip line. Cover with the existing or new mulch. Be sure to water thoroughly after applying to allow the nutrients to work down through the soil to the roots of the plants.

Another time to use worm castings is when you are planting your favorite fall flowers or vegetable gardens in order to obtain optimum colors and produce. Also when planting your bulbs later in the fall for next spring’s flowers be sure to mix worm castings in the soil before inserting the bulb as well as when covering it up. This will help to insure flowers next spring that will surely be the envy of your neighbors (Unless your neighbor is also reading this!).

Early fall is also a good time to broadcast worm castings across your grass areas, usually recommend at ten pounds per one hundred square feet of area. A word of caution to any lazy folks out there… A couple years ago I planted Rye grass seed for the winter in South Carolina and utilized worm castings when I seeded in the fall. I ended up cutting that area of yard approximately every two weeks all winter long!

By using worm castings early in the fall will give your plants a head start come next spring. Once again, usually towards the middle to end of spring, you will want to re-fertilize your prized areas to help insure they do well in the warmer summer months.

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Rather than give you my personal input which goes along with what I am about to reveal in this article I am going to post facts along with their associated sources as well as test results with pictures from my own garden and worm tea brew.

Now suppliers that sell worm castings, also known as vermicast (not to be confused with vermicompost which is some unprocessed organic matter mixed with worm castings) agree that worm castings offer great benefits to the soil, plants and root growth. They all also agree they are loaded with aerobic microbes (microscopic aerobic bacteria, fungi…). They basically all agree they should have a fresh earth smell to them similar to top soil, hence, no need to go any further trying to prove these points since all are in agreement.

Going back to the origin and history of the word aerobic:

“living only in the presence of oxygen,” 1884, (after Fr. aérobie,  coined 1863 by Louis Pasteur) from Gk. aero-  ”air” (combining form) + bios  ”life”

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper

Modern day definition of the word aerobic:

: living, active, or occurring only in the presence of oxygen

Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The list goes on, however for the point of this article I believe you get the point… Only in the presence of oxygen!

So now we know that worm castings are loaded with beneficial aerobic microbes for our plants whether indoor or outdoor.

Now being we cannot see individual aerobic microbes without the use of a good quality microscope, let me use an example which you can picture.

A goldfish is aerobic and requires oxygen to survive. Let’s say that you go to the local county fair and win a goldfish which they hand to you in a plastic bag half filled with water and half filled with air. You go home and place the goldfish on the mantle for the time being until you get the time to acquire a fish tank for the little guy.

For the next few days on your way downstairs in the morning you have a glance over at the mantle and the little guy is doing well… perhaps this weekend you will get him a fish tank…

About the fourth day you come downstairs and the goldfish is now belly up floating in the bag because it ran out of oxygen

So what do you think happens when you seal worm castings loaded with aerobic microbes in a bag just like the goldfish?

OK, some will tell you they just go dormant and when introduced to oxygen again they wake up. OK so we open the bag with the goldfish up and introduce oxygen again and sit back and wait… and wait… You get the picture.

Now to be perfectly honest there are literally a few, three that I have heard of, aerobic microbes that can go dormant for a while and become active with the reintroduction of oxygen. This is out of thousands upon thousands of known microbes… I am not even sure if any of the three will exist in worm castings. So in essence, the microbes in worm castings die.

In fact those that sell worm castings state it has a fresh earthy smell to it, however if you purchase a sealed bag of castings from a store shelf or online, open it… there is no smell at all or may even contain a foul smell.  The fact is all the beneficial aerobic microbes are dead just like the goldfish from above.

To prove this further, I went ahead and planted four types of seed in my garden divided into two categories. One with fresh worm castings from Organic Worm Farm, the others from a major brand name company ( I will not mention the name of the company here as I am not trying to give a bad name to anyone but rather explain the reasoning behind why sealed bags of worm castings are useless). At the same time, I know someone that supplies their worm castings to the company that sells this brand in a sealed bag. The personal worm castings produced by this individual are every bit as good as the one’s produced on Organic Worm Farm when shipped out to the processing company that bags them. In short it is not the quality of the worm castings which comes into play here and why I chose this particular brand of worm castings sold in a sealed bag.

The results were astounding to say the least from germination time required to the current growth rates. I am writing this article now as I took pictures yesterday before I went out and sprayed and watered all the plants with fresh brewed worm tea hence spoiling the experiment from this point forward.

Before I go on, be aware all the seeds planted in the pictures below received the same growing medium with the exception of bagged versus fresh worm castings, same amount of water, sunlight…

Here in the first picture are some Fennel seed plants. For those unfamiliar with fennel, it is an Italian seasoning found in real Italian sausage…  :-) The fennel plant on the left was planted with the sealed bag of worm castings while the one on the right with fresh worm castings.

Fennel Seed Plants

The next picture is of two Roma tomato plants. Again the one on the left lower corner was planted using worm castings from a sealed bag while the one on the right using fresh castings.

Roma Tomato Plants & Worm Castings

This next picture depicts Ruby Red Swiss Chard with the plant on the right using the sealed bag of worm castings and the one on the left using the fresh.

Comparing Worm Castings on Swiss Chard

This next photo is straight neck summer squash. Again, the one on the left used the sealed castings while the one on the right used fresh.

Worm Castings Comparison on Summer Squash

Now this brings me to the brewed worm tea section of this article. First let me say that if you have one of the stackable worm farm systems with the spigot on the bottom, what comes out of there is not worm tea which you will better understand if you read a previous article I wrote some time ago, the Difference Between Worm Tea and Leachate .

Allow me to take a moment and explain the reasoning behind worm tea. When one brews a worm tea properly, correct temperature, aeration, food sources, they are exponentially exploding the beneficial aerobic bacteria population while at the same time not increasing the population of beneficial aerobic fungi but rather allowing them to grow in size. In short, you are generating more, larger and healthier aerobic microbes to feed your soil and plants with.

So what happens when you brew worm tea from worm castings which come from a sealed bag? Well I thought this would be another good part to this experiment so after I brewed a batch from fresh worm castings I decided to start another batch from the ones I purchased in a sealed bag.

The first picture depicts the worm tea brewed with fresh worm castings from Organic Worm Farm. You can notice the transparency of the bubbles commonly referred to as froth in the brew. This is exactly what you are looking for.

Froth That Develops When Brewing Worm Tea

Here in the next photo I even went a further step as the night before, even though the sealed bag of worm castings did not have an odor, the worm tea brew had an anaerobic smell, basically a foul smell to it.  It also had a brown colored froth something I have only seen before when one is brewing and explodes the aerobic microbe count and does not add additional food hence end up killing some of the aerobic microbes creating the brownish froth. I added extra food to the tea. By morning this still was a brown froth.

Worm Tea Depicting Brown Froth

Next I added fresh worm castings to the mix and a few hours later, bam, we had transparent froth developing in the brew, hence the clear bubbles towards the center while the brown froth still remained towards the outer edges. The foul smell was gone and it smelled sweat as it should.

Being all this gets confusing for many allow me to try and explain in plain English. The earth under our feet is teaming with life, the “richer” the soil, the more beneficial life usually contained within. To give you an idea, in one cup of soil there can be literally billions of live microorganisms contained therein. However, poorer quality soils can also be teaming with life, just not the ones we want or our plants.

Each microbe has a purpose in life which becomes an entangled web by which one benefit another by giving a free ride to another to greener pastures… protects your plants from harmful microbes… or which finds another a delicious treat…

When dealing with soil and worm castings there are two categories of microbes we need be concerned with, aerobic, the good guys and anaerobic, the bad guys. Now some of you know I have written about worm castings as well touched on aerobic versus anaerobic before, however now I am going to explain in more detail as well as back it up by other renowned experts.

The reason this was so important to bring back up and to elaborate on is the fact each year around this time through the fall I have folks contact me stating they have either generated worm castings themselves or moreover purchased worm castings in the past and neither the worm castings nor worm tea showed any benefits. So I figured here was a good time to show why some worm castings are so beneficial while others do not produce results.

First, the definition of aerobic: requires oxygen to survive.

To further this:

“…anaerobic conditions foster pathogenic bacteria and worse, kill off beneficial aerobic bacteria… Some anaerobic bacteria produce alcohols that are toxic to plant life and to other bacteria. These anaerobic bacteria can be avoided when gardening by controlling the conditions that allow them to multiply; poor soil texture, lack of pore space, standing water and compacted soil.” Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web By Jeff Lowenfels & Wayne Lewis, Forward by Elaine Ingham

Anyone not familiar with the authors who are highly respected adding to the fact that Elaine Ingham is one of the leading authorities on soil and well respected when it comes to earthworms, now you know!

Now being the above statement has to do with soil management the same principles apply to worm castings. After all, worm castings help create not only beneficial soil underground to approximately 6 inches in depth but also are one of the main components to generating the top soil which resides on the surface to a depth of approximately 1/8 of an inch.

For instance, “standing water and compacted soil” is one reason Organic Worm Farm has refused to offer worm farms with the spigot on the bottom. Once you overload your worm bin with water you are in essence compacting your worm bedding material and generating standing water, which in this case is leachate, full of anaerobic microbes which come out of the spigot. The manufacturers and those promoting these types of worm farms state it is worm tea, which could not be further from the truth.

Worm tea on the other hand is a delicate process by which you aerate good “aerobic” worm castings in a mixture of non-chlorinated water along with some other additives over a period of 24 to 48 hours at 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit, hence exploding the beneficial aerobic microbe count exponentially.

To picture another with readymade worm farms offering a spigot you are creating swamp mud which is anaerobic and a known disease causing environment in humans and animals. Step in it and your shoe gets stuck due to the vacuum created since the air cannot penetrate which would allow you to pull your shoe out freely. If your shoe sank in sand at the beach, you could easily pull your shoe back out since it is surrounded by free flowing air. However go towards the water’s edge and get your shoe stuck in the sand and once again it becomes difficult to pull out.

Worm castings when generated and stored correctly retain millions of aerobic microbes. In order for one to generate the best quality worm castings temperature comes into play since certain microbes you want to survive in the worm bin are active at ranges from 70 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  A reasonable temperature range to raise worms and produce premium worm castings is 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Think about his for a moment. During the main growing seasons throughout a majority of the world the ambient temperature ranges from 70 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and is when microbes are most active in your garden areas.

Here on our worm farm we maintain a controlled environment throughout the year maintaining a constant temperature of 78 degree.

A worm bin with bedding material which is not packed down should maintain a 30% moisture level at all times throughout the bed. If the same bedding material were packed the reading on a soil moisture meter would read approximately 70%. It is similar to soaking some paper in a bucket of water. Pick it up gently and squeeze and some water will run off. Allow it to lay in the palm of your hand then and it appears to be drier than if you were to squeeze firmly releasing additional water.

Issues also arrive when storing vermicast. When they are generated at 78 degrees Fahrenheit then stored outside during the winter at 20 degrees, many of the beneficial microbes are killed off since they cannot survive at these temperatures. Vermicast needs to be kept aerated, moistened at 30% moisture and stored in the ideal temperature range they were created in order to maintain maximum benefits.

Another issue of worm castings being stored outside is the fact that airborne contaminants come into play, i.e. unwanted seeds which will flourish in your garden.

When you go to buy worm castings and they are sold in sealed plastic bags or containers, no oxygen can penetrate. This renders the worm castings either useless or harmful allowing malicious anaerobic microbes to take over.

For example let’s assume you go to a local county fair and one of your kids wins a goldfish, which by the way is aerobic. You take your prize home in a sealed plastic bag half filled with water and the other half filled with air, place it on a shelf and forget about it. The goldfish will be fine for several days, however by the end of the week it will be belly up and you will have some explaining to do to the kids!

This is why Organic Worm Farm offers worm castings which have been stored correctly and shipped in breathable bags.

Another issue with buying worm castings is the fact that many are produced from waste such as vegetable scraps which include seeds. Being the worm bins cannot be heated as ordinary compost bin without frying the worms, these seeds can sprout within and around your potted plants, vegetable and flower gardens… This is why we have worked and tried to perfect the 14 Day Worm Castings process where one does not use vegetable scraps, manure or any other items which could end up contaminating the worm castings, hence eliminating sprouting of unwanted seeds around your prized possession.

Bruce

I decided to try something different in a simple fodder growing system I use for my rabbit feed to see if the worm castings themselves will act as plant food directly. I used the fodder since I normally grow it for approximately nine days from the sow date to finished product. This would enable me to see if plants can benefit immediately from worm castings or if they would have to sit a while to encourage growth of bacteria and fungi before being very useful.

Normally when growing the fodder, which is simply a hydroponic way to grow feed (I grow barley) to approximately six inches tall, the seeds and sprouts are watered three times daily. Both trays received the same amount of water (collected rainwater), 2 cups of barley seed and lighting. In this experiment there were only two variables.

The tray on the left side was grown as normal with just water while the tray on the right side had a thin layer of worm castings produced by the 14 Day Worm Castings process, added to the bottom of the tray prior to sowing the barley seed.

You can notice in the photo below that the individual blades have opened on the left tray while they are just beginning to open up on the right.

Also illustrated, the barley on the right with the worm castings is almost as tall as the one on the left however this is where the major difference comes into play since the barley on the left has been growing almost twice as long as the tray with the added worm castings on the right side.

The barley on the left had been sowed 9 days earlier while the barley with the worm castings was only 5 days ago hence showing that the plants in this experiment with the worm castings are growing almost twice as fast as those without!

In conclusion, this illustrates the benefits of worm castings not just as a soil conditioner helping to revitalize the surrounding soil but as a direct food source the plants can process immediately.

The same worm castings used in this experiment are available from the Organic Worm Farm online store.

For others that would like to generate their own continuous supply of worm castings just like the ones used in the above experiment, the 14 Day Worm Castings eBook offers step by step directions using the same process used on Organic Worm Farm.

It was not until the earlier part of the 1900’s that composting began to evolve.

Today, tens of thousands of regular folks are taking part in composting via a tumbler or compost pile they manually turn periodically utilizing aerobic microbes to assist in the breakdown of organic matter.

The one area many people are unaware of is that by introducing red worms and even some nightcrawlers better known as worm composting or vermicomposting, can assist and be even more beneficial than traditional composting.

First, rather than having to turn the pile, the red worms are constantly eating organic matter moving through the pile. This aids in the aeration of the system which can save you time and your back!

Secondly red worms can speed the process of breaking down your compost pile allowing you to benefit faster from your (or should I say your worms) efforts.

Lastly, without getting all scientific here, worms have another benefit when they produce worm castings also known as worm poop and vermicast. The worm castings contain additional beneficial bacteria which are in the worm’s digestive system. Even though there is little known to how exactly worm castings work, test have shown that plants that are introduced to soil containing worm castings grow faster, produce more fruit, vegetables and flowers as well are less susceptible to soil born diseases.

One item that stands out with the addition of worm castings is the superior root growth over those without. This may even help to explain some of the results from the tests performed on plants using worm castings in the soil mix since a healthier root system usually means a healthier plant.

Now there are over 2,200 species known to man so how does one select the right worm for the job?

There are four basic worms that can be used depending mostly on your local climate conditions. One of the most popular known are the red wigglers. It is a smaller worm which can tolerate cooler temperatures as low as about 50 degrees and fair alright in warmer temperature upwards of 90 degrees or so Fahrenheit. When I discuss temperatures I am not referring to the ambient temperature but rather the temperatures within the compost pile itself.

Another worm would be the European nightcrawlers which are not really a nightcrawler… more on this topic can be found here (opens in a new window). This worm can tolerate the cooler temperatures of around mid forties however does not fare well above 85 degrees and extreme humidity. This worm is also referred to as a trout worm and leaf worm.

Alabama Jumpers are probably one of the most versatile worms as it originated in the tropics of some Asian countries and can be found as far north as northern New England. Alabama Jumpers actually fall under the earthworm category since they can burrow well beneath the surface which also helps aerate the soil around plants deeper than most other worms. This worm can tolerate very warm conditions and will become sluggish in the mid fifties. Now one unique trait of some earthworms is to be able to survive very low temperatures by basically burrowing down beneath the surface and going into a process similar to hibernation. To read more on this worm, visit the Alabama Jumpers Blog.

For very warm climates year round African nightcrawlers will do the trick. Yes, this worm originated in Africa and can tolerate up to 110 degrees in the shade as long as it has circulating air. If temperatures within the compost pile fall below 60 degrees the worms will begin to die off.

One thing to keep in mind, should temperatures fall to cool and kill off the worms, if they have laid cocoons (worm eggs) they will hatch come the spring even if they freeze.

Bruce