Hi all, Just got done cloning some Kali 47, Shark Widow, Somango Widow, Chem Dawg 4, and my Blue Dream x Animal Cookies cross. I was thinking of trying out various experiments on a few of them and one of them being growing with live worms in the soil. My questions are: 1. Would the worms ruin my roots before my plants reach a certain level of maturity? 2. Would the worms survive my nutrients feedings (GH Flower/Rapid Roots every other feeding)? Just want to know if it's worth even trying. Thanks in advance for all feedback Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
If you went all organic there would be worms and tons of microbial activity in your soil - all very positive things for your plant. Not sure any life will survive with liquid ferts regularly running through it. 135w UFO LED Micro Grow: http://forum.grasscity.com/index.php?/topic/1308910-135W-Led--Organic-1St-Grow
Very true...I'll do some independent research but does anyone know off the top of their head how organic GH flower is? From what I was told and have seen it's 100%. If that's true, I could just cut out the rapid roots and the earthworms should survive right? Especially if I do two pure water feedings for every one nutrient feed. Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Pouring excess salts into the media will kill the worms, so no, they would not survive your fertilizer applications. No they wont ruin your roots, provided you have enough volume to accommodate them. Solo cups work swell with seeds though I use 2 inch nursery pots myself for cloning, both using a mix of 1 part homemade vermicompost - 9 parts sphagnum peat moss - 1 part rice hulls. I would suggest building a living soil in order to fully obtain their benefits.
Yeah looks like I'll just have to start a compost bin with fruit and worms and just use that soil. I typically grow in two 5 gallon Home Depot mixing buckets. I drill holes in the bucket I'll be putting soil in and let the run off drain into the lower bucket and recycle the water. With that being said....I should be able to thrive with the worms if I cut out the nuts and use the recycled water right? Someone recommended just strictly foliar feeding the nuts and pure watering the soil....thoughts on that? If you can't tell, I'm dying to grow with worms in my soil lol. Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Make a super soil mix. Cycle for one month or so, add worms and plant. This is an environment the worms can thrive in and make it easier on yourself not having to use bottles. Win win. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Never tried the nursery pots. I've always used the leftover small pots my girlfriend has from growing sage and all her herbs. I even germinate my seeds directly into soil in these pots as well. Gives me a pretty nice root culture and is the perfect size for my raised ground growing method. If your not sure what that is, it's pretty much transplanting a plant without stripping it of its previous soil. It creates a mound in the new pot and the new soil pretty much acts like a moat. The water never touches the base of the plants and the roots that are above ground, but still in the previous dirt, reach out the sides into the new soil and harden. This makes the roots hard and transforms them into oxygen roots. Carrying even more oxygen up into the plant that the soil roots might not be getting. Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
For me, adding (adult), worms to the mix never worked out that well. However, I do end up with plenty of worms in my larger containers (5gal+), from the use of fresh vermicompost. That has a good bit of baby worms and cocoons that grow and hatch and grow into the mix, rather than trying to force adult worms to adapt all at once. Get your worm bin going, you'll have plenty of worms. Wet
I've been curious about an organic/live soil myself... I haven't grown anything as of yet, but I do intend to. Trying to swell up my knowledge pool first so I'm not feeling helpless and alone through any of the process, but that's also what you good guys (and gals!) are here for, right? Now, my question to this is, with a live soil, will that attract other unwanted bugs/pests into my tent/soil? I guess, do live soils ever cause other sorts of pest problems, plus how hard is it to keep your area clean when recycling soil? (Can somebody explain to me the soil recycling process? A concise summary should be fine for now.) Edit: Thanks in advance! Where are my manners...?
Sounds like the smartest way to approach this. Thanks for the advice....never even considered the adapting as adults angle. I'll prob just create my own compost bin and either use the vermicompost and plant in that soil just using the worms that grew in it. Any certain amount of time I should let the compost bin develop? Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
I would imagine that pest would be more likely in adult store bought worms that may be carrying parasites and so forth. However, if you create your own compost bin and store it properly I don't think that would be any more of an issue than the typical mite and so on. Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Nightcrawlers, If you can find a place to get them do it. I went to a drainage basin that always stays moist from lawn run off. Do this at night when the nightcrawlers are out. I went every night and filled a 2 lb coffee can each trip and brought them home and dumped them in a different part of the garden. This was after I had screened all the rocks and pebbles out of my garden and incorporated truck loads of horse manure and compost into it. Now when it rains we have 100's of worms all over the patio and sidewalks and driveway.Those worms now leave castings like gopher mounds so bad they make my lawn bumpy but I am not complaining because of the beneifit they do in the garden.
Most night-crawlers go deep though so they are not as useful for a plant's benefit as red wigglers I don't think.
Exactly! Which is why poacherjoe found earthworms everywhere except where he needs them - in the material turning organic matter into vermicompost. It also explains why red wigglers are the biggest segment of the fishing worm market because you can produce copious amounts of both worms and vermicompost. Red wigglers double in population every 90 days so if one started with 3,000 cocoons that would give you about 12,000 worms when they hatch. They begin to process bacterial slime immediately and will do so 24/7 until they die - about 4 - 5 years if conditions are correct in the worm bin. They become sexually mature in about 45 days and from that point forward each worm will produce 2 - 4 cocoons each week. HTH CC
Thanks CC. The population of my red wigglers has diminished lately and I am thinking it's lack of food. I have one of those Worm Inn's that is made of cordura nylon with a screened opening at the top and it bunches together at the bottom spout until you are ready to harvest castings. I put about 1 lb of food a week for them from vegetable/fruit scraps as well as some used coffee grinds and a little egg shell I dry and then run through an old coffee grinder to turn the egg shell into a powder the worms can use for their gizzards. I think I need to up the food as these containers were meant to have food constantly fed through the top and the castings fall to the bottom.
MotaMike Please don't take any offense because I got stung on a similar worm bin like you did - the Can-O-Worms which turned out to be the absolute worst way to produce any level of quality vermicompost. The problem is excessive water and that's especially true when adding kitchen scraps. Consider that even apples are 85% water so a full case (i.e. lug) of quality apples means that your 40 lbs. quickly turned into 6 lbs. of food and 34 lbs. of water and as incredible as composting worms are they cannot turn water into vermicompost. Laws of physics and all. Buy a huge SmartPot (#30 or larger) and set it on a pallet for drainage. Fill with quality thermal compost or aged mammalian manure and aging means about 5 or 6 weeks for the vermicides the animals have been treated with will have had enough time to degrade making it safe. Animal vermicides aren't selective at all - they kill any worm that I could come up with. Now you have a functional vermicompost process working for you for less than $20.00! I have 3 ea. #65 SmartPots working as well as Dan Holcomb's OSCR (Oregon Soil Company Reactor), i.e a vertical flow-through design exactly like Chunk is using. He built mine for me so I can attest to the level of production this design is capable of. But for starters just get a large SmartPot and you'll be movin' and groovin' to a moon-aged child... HTH CC
i put about 100 red wigglers in each container of my hand built soil about 5 months ago they look ok i guess..
Zombie Farms Stunning would be the word I would have chosen. No problem bragging on yourself with results like this! CC
Yeah, they look OK. I guess... I bet it ain't the worms... Nice looking crop, ZF. I'm jelly... can't pull off this kind of thing outdoors where I live. "8 weekers" are hard to finish here before the first frost...