For a successful, productive and healthy garden it is vital to feed the soil organic nutrients. Everyone knows worms are amazing for our garden. The castings worms produce plays an important role in the health of the soil, which supplies vital nutrients to the plant.
Worm castings (otherwise known as worm poop or manure), have a smell earthy and are safe for plants, animals and children.
How do worm castings really help our plants
More than just adding NPK
While many garden fertilizers primarily just add nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) to the soil, worm castings provide this and so much more. Such as natural growth hormones and trace minerals, both essential to favorable plant growth.
What makes our castings better and more efficient than chemical fertilizers and animal manure? The high amount of humid acid worm castings contains.
Humid acid makes nutrients readily available for plants by freeing them up in the soil. Before plants can use nutrients from other soil amendments they first must be broken down.
Our worm castings create healthy, living soil
The unique digestive system of the worm creates beneficial microbes and bacteria, which plays an import role in producing healthy soil and strong, productive plants.
Protect the plant from diseases and pests
“Healthy plants growing on soils with good biological diversity can mount a strong defense against many pests,” According to the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. “Many plants also produce chemicals that slow down insect feeding. While not killing the insect, it at least limits the damage. Beneficial organisms that attack and kill insect pests need a variety of sources of nutrition. Developing optimal soil health is, therefore, the basis for management of crop pests on farms—it should be a central goal that underpins crop integrated pest management (IPM) programs.”
You can produce worm castings by purchasing worms and making a worm farm. This does take effort, regularly feed, monitoring, and maintaining the worm farm. Which is why many home gardeners and farmers purchase high quality organic worm castings as well as other soil amendments from Vermitechnology.