By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer
Red wriggler worms are garden wizards, says Kay Goddard, who runs the vermiculture (worm composting) program at Shipley Nature Center in Huntington Beach, Calif. Give them shredded newspaper, carrot peels, coffee grounds, spoiled fruit, stale bread, and lots of other stuff you'd normally assign to the trash, and the worms will convert it into a superb fertilizer.
Their rich castings (worm poop, in other words) benefit all plants, she says. Add to your potting mix for container plants, as they do at the Center. (One part worm castings to 3 parts potting soil is a good proportion.)
Toss a handful into the bottom of the hole whenever you add a new plant to the garden, and sprinkle some around the base of your houseplants, too.
All you need to start vermiculture is a box with a cover of some sort and a pound or more of worms. The box can be a commercial worm bin — many nurseries and mass merchandisers carry them and you'll also find them online. (If you happen to live in Huntington Beach, attend one of the workshops at Shipley Nature Center, and you can buy a VermiPro bin afterwards for $49 instead of the usual $125.)
You can also build a simple wooden worm bin yourself. It only has to be 8 to 16 inches deep and can be as small as 2 feet square. Even an old dresser drawer covered with burlap or plastic would work.
You can buy red worms — not the same as the earthworms you typically find in soil — at a bait shop and online.
Fill up most of your bin with shredded paper, add worms, and begin feeding food scraps. (A pound of worms will eat about 1/2 pound of food scraps per day.) In three to six months, you can begin harvesting castings.
For details on harvesting, their food likes and dislikes, a worm-bin trouble-shooting guide, and other useful tips on vermiculture, visit Earth 911.
Wilbur the worm, by the way, was drawn by Huntington Beach artist Tim Hogan.
