Folks, I've been gardening for 25 years, and only now am I getting into the Vegetables. I've grown Bonsai, flowers, hot peppers, herbs, and water plants all along but never had the chance for food plants as I never had enough sun until now.
I've been sheet mulching for around 3 1/2 years now, and think it's brilliant. In the 80's, after reading about what I think was square foot gardening, I had the idea of putting out the compost instead of buying potting soil but it was an awful lot of work with a rake. I know what I'm doing with compost now.
I also raise
Eisenia Fetida and
E. Hortensis for castings. THESE ARE NOT GARDEN WORMS! These worms are as different from the earthworms you find stirring your soil as you are from a marmoset or spider monkey. We may eat the same foods, but we don't live the same way.
Eisenia are
Epigeous or litter worms. That means they live in the top 4 inches of their ecology, or the litter deposited on the surface. E. Fetida is famous for colonizing manure piles after they've cooled, and are economically valuable for their voracious habits.
Most of the worms we are familiar with are actually invasive species that came over in the dung piles and flower pots when the Europeans came to the western hemisphere. In some cases the natural diversity of forest is being threatened by these species.
The garden worm everyone is most familiar with is
Lumbricus. I can't really say which ones, but probably the garden worm
, Lumbricus rubellus, and
Lumbricus terrestris the Nightcrawler
. These worms live in burrows up to 9 feet down, churning soil and building channels they pump air through by crawling.
Putting the "Red Wigglers," probably Eisenia Hortensis, that you buy down at the bait store will NOT work in any garden soil, unless there it's mostly organic material, because their habitat is litter rather than earth. Since annelids are primarily omnivores, eating the stuff that grows on the organic matter as well as the matter, when the nutritive content drops the worms will either move out or die as a result.
Earthworms are what you will need to loosen the mineral content of the systems being described here. In nature the burrows are somewhat spread, but with enough foodstuffs the populations increase, burrows being much closer.
