Creating Organic Manure with Earthworms

in #blog9 months ago

Back in the early days of my mobile farming, i needed high quality nutrient rich soil to plant my seeds and nourish the other garden. I typically look out for the dark soil as a possible sign of nutrient rich high quality soil type. I noticed part of the land close to the mobile garden always have the kind of soil I was looking for inform of little pile of dark soil around tiny holes. I later discovered the holes and piles of soil were made by earthworms which live inside the holes under the soil. Whenever I removed the soil, the worms seem to pile them up again, most likely early in the morning daily. I later realized the piles of soil were the earthworms poops, but they look exactly like soil and were really nice looking considering I was looking for soil with that sort of color and texture for the garden.


So, the earthworms basically feed on dead plants, leaves, etc and they are converted to soil like poops which they pass out at the top of the soil in piles. And the piles of soil are rich in nutrients because I usually gathered them together, spread them on top of the garden then used the remaining ones to plant some tomatoe seeds to see how well the seeds grow. And behold, they grew so fast and were all looking so healthy compared to the seeds I planted in normal soil. Then I thought this could be a better source of organic manure rather than using cow or chicken poops which do not look so attractive like the earthworms'. I began to think of how to scale this up for my garden. By the way, I tried to see if I could get couple of earthworms in the garden to live there and naturally produce the manure. I did that and it worked but they weren't producing enough probably because they were few in number, but I don't want the whole garden to be filled with worms. And the worms tend to stop producing the manure after sometimes, guess the food resource weren't enough for them in the mobile garden for reproduction, it was as if whenever they got old, they all die off with no replacement. So, i came up with an Idea . I got a bag, pour wet soil in it, up to a quarter of the bag, added some leftover foods from kitchen. I then introduced lots of worms I found in soil under rocks, dead woods, etc. I covered the bag and let the worms live there, feed on the leftover foods and covert them into the nutrient rich manure. It actually worked really well as I noticed that the worms still live there weeks later, which means they probably fed on the foods to stay alive that long and reproduced. Much of the food were nowhere to be found, all I saw was mostly black soil (which is the kind of soil I was looking for) with very few solid food remains, more like how bones are leftover after flesh have been devoured by a carnivore. I let the worms finish the process, and in the end I used the soil for my little garden which is doing really well.

You can try this method aswell to produce sufficient organic manure for your farm or for other farmers, but make sure you feed the earthworms with things that are purely organic to maintain the high quality state of the organic manure.

**Related Posts**

Watch out for Animals and Plants that feed on synthetic foods

Avoid synthetic foods. Here is exactly what they are

Sort:  

Congratulations @manuel-nk! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)

You published more than 20 posts.
Your next target is to reach 30 posts.

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Check out our last posts:

Feedback from the May Hive Power Up Day
Hive Power Up Month Challenge - April 2024 Winners List
Hive Power Up Day - May 1st 2024