Thanks again. Good to have you onboard here. Lots of help!
That sentence make the work worth it. Glad I could help.
I have a question, I'm pretty interested in trying some worm tea out, but I have been feeding with inorganic ferts for a few months now. If I was trying to get a nice little Eco system started in my pots, would the residual inorganic chemicals screw things up? I would think it would kill off the Mycorrhizae at the least, hopefully not all the other beneficial things in there.
Sweet topic btw, very well done.
No worries, nature can be forgiving. Let your plants dry out until they start to weep, then flush the soil out well with some chlorine free water. I mean soak the crap out of it untill it is coming out the bottom. Let that dry a few days and bring on the Tea. I would use full strength super rich stuff the first few times just to get it going.
Rich Tea would be like half a gallon of compost/what ever to 5 gal of water.
Normal would be like 2 handfuls.
It would be better to start with good soil, but it is possible to build it up. One thing with soil is variety. You want a complete food web going. so make teas that have a buffet of stuff in there like lawn clippings, fish, kelp, guano, weeds, the neighbor's kid, what ever you can get your hands on. Be sure to add sugars like Molasses to the mix so that the microbes have some food to eat so they can do what they do best... multiply.
Good luck and thanks.
I've been vermicomposting for about 8 months now. Castings are great for tea and to add to potting media, but I would caution against having live worms in the mix with very young seedlings. I had been doing so, and for the past month I thought I was losing a lot of plants to damping off. But from reading Darwin's monograph on earthworms I got the idea (and confirmed it with a night-time observation) that it was red wrigglers from the vermicompost that were gnawing off my babies at the base. Grrr. From now on, I'll be careful about isolating my seedling pots from the worms.
You are right. I am scared to put them in my pots, the little guys can eat there body weight in 24hrs... what happens when they run out of food? Roots?
I have seen them first hand eat card board, I'm sure roots gotta be better than cardboard. As for a raised bed or in ground bed, they can just move on to greener pastures when they eat all they want.
I think that would be one bad thing about putting castings in soil as a dressing or amendment, there are egg every where. I see them all the time. they are a gold color and about 1/8" diameter balls. So putting those in pots is the same as putting worms in pots.