Transporting red wigglers

Vermicomposting uses worms to create nutrient-rich worm castings that significantly improves overall plant health.
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Serafina
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I’ve had my hungry bin for 7 months now and it’s been kept inside the entire time. I have a large amount of
worms now :) Andrew mentioned in the compost zoom meeting that you can take worms from the hungry bin and put them out in your pots on your balcony. I always thought compost worms needed decaying matter or food in order to survive? I’m going to be making a new garden bed - can I just take some of the worms and put them outside in the bed even if they are used to the warmth of inside and a steady supply of veggie scraps? And can this be done at any time of year? Can they also be put into a thermophilic compost pile? What happens when the compost is finished - will the worms just leave and survive? Also I’ve always wondered where are there red wigglers in the wild and will they naturally come into the compost pile or are those night crawlers? Sorry for all the questions! Thank you!
PeasIntheRain
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Serafina wrote: Thu 28-Apr-2022, 13:25 Also I’ve always wondered where are there red wigglers in the wild and will they naturally come into the compost pile or are those night crawlers?
Well... there probably are a range of earthworms where you live, including ones that will be useful in your compost pile. But earthworms are actually a reintroduction from Europe. There are many different kinds in North America now. The proliferation of red wigglers as 'the' compost worm and their transport across large geographic distances through purchases for gardens is a bit strange.

I find this personally challenging because of the strong messaging most of us have grown up with (and receive now from gardeners) that earthworms are always friends and always part of a local system. I tackle this in a small way by avoiding any major movement of soil (for example, never take dirt from beds or containers to a park or preserve to dump them) and altering spaces conservatively (keeping some spaces separate and native/wild, even as that means removing invasives and managing the land; keeping non-native plantings and areas of high disturbance/amendment close to the house; minimizing space converted for gardening and compost amendments). There's no way that one of us alone is going to amend the system entirely -- the worms are already here. But I did make a choice to not purchase worms for vermicompost. I put together a bin system and collected worms from the garden here to see if they'll reproduce and handle it; you'll be hearing from me if it works well. :)

Some reading:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... s/21808464

That article references science by Malte Jochum. Here's one article of his that is very readable as it was put together for Frontiers for Young Minds, an initiative to open up science to younger readers and ESL readers: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... Ecosystems (Figure 2 is useful!)

This is a grant proposal from Jochum's lab from 2019, open access, so it doesn't have answers but the abstract lays out the question clearly: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... an_forests
"European earthworm invasions of northern North American forests cause simultaneous species gains and losses with significant consequences for essential ecosystem processes like nutrient cycling and crucial services to humanity like soil erosion control and carbon sequestration."
Serafina
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Hi, thanks for your reply. Very interesting stuff!
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