It suddenly dawned on me this morning that I have yet to write anything about my vermicomposting trenches this season! This is my favorite vermicomposting / gardening system after all, so I think it is time to bring everyone up to speed on this front.

I should mention right off the bat that most of my “trenches” are much more like windrows, due to an accumulation of rich vermicompost over time. Remember, I am not harvesting vermicompost from these beds – I am allowing plants to grow nearby and access the compost directly. What I AM harvesting from the beds, however, are Red Worms for my own small, local worm business – and in an effort to keep the ‘worm herd’ thriving I have been adding a fair amount of manure (primarily alpaca and horse manure), which certainly contributes to the mounding of the beds as well.

This year has been an amazing growing season in comparison to last year (for both worms AND plants). We’ve had lots of sun, lots of heat, but also lots of rain – so everything has been doing very well. I’ve included a shot taken back in June, showing the same garden zone shown in the first two photos above (taken this morning). As you can see, the plants have grown considerably in the last month!
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Some of you may recall that for the last couple of seasons, I have been growing tomatoes in the stretch of garden pictured above. Last year was NOT a great year for growing tomatoes, and I ended up with a pretty bad infestation of some sort of fungal leave disease (written about here: “Vermicomposting Trenches – 2009 – Update“), so I wanted to play it a little bit safe by basically keeping tomatoes out of that bed (pretty well the ONLY bed I don’t have tomatoes growing in this year – haha!). I also thought it would be fun to grow some corn along to fence so as to add some depth to my all-natural privacy fence!

Speaking of which…as you can tell, the sunflowers (of the “Kong” variety) are doing great on the other side of my fence. They are not really associated with my trench beds at all, but I have little doubt that they are still benefiting from the overall fertility of my yard these days. I will write more about them in another post.

Other plants growing in the beds adjacent to my trench windrows include zucchini (yellow and green), pumpkin, several varieties of pole beans, raspberries, and of course tomatoes! My sandbox raised bed garden is actually almost entirely dedicated to tomato plants this year, but I do have a few asparagus plants in there now as well. This is the one bed where the trench still actually looks like a trench. I have a huge beefsteak tomato plant (on the left in photo below – of course, the pic just doesn’t do it justice) which seems to really benefiting from the trench, and contributing to the reduction in volume that this stretch of trench seems to be experiencing (even though I’ve been adding a LOT of materials – alpaca manure, homemade manure, food waste etc).

Given the fact that I had so many tomato plants in need of a home earlier in the season, I needed to get a bit more creative with my plantings, above and beyond simply putting lots of them in my regular trench garden beds. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if I literally planted some of them right in the trench itself, and on the lawn side. If you look back at the first three pictures you should see what I mean.

Of course, I couldn’t go TOO crazy with this approach, since I still needed to access the beds to get worms, add new material etc, so I ended up spacing them about 10 feet or so apart. As mentioned, a lot of manure has been added to these beds (and I have little doubt that the tomatoes have been benefiting from that), but I have also been adding a fair amount of food waste and grass clippings directly in behind each trench tomato plant. Not too surprisingly, these plants seem to be doing quite a bit better than the other ones (of the same variety) being grown next to the trench, but in the actual garden.

I’ve been pretty lazy with my approach to adding food waste during the last couple of months. Rather than bothering to make up a nice batch of homemade manure, I’ve simply tossed my bags of food waste (and shredded cardboard) into my deep freezer for awhile, and the frozen waste ball has then buried behind the plants.

Once the waste materials thaw out, they seem to all but vanish in a very short period of time! I suspect there are quite a lot more critters apart from worms benefiting from the addition of this stuff!

Anyway, I will definitely write more about my trench beds a bit later in the season (to let everyone know how everything turned out) – hopefully this has been enough to provide everyone with a decent idea of what I’m up to thus far!
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I thought it might not be a bad idea post a quick update on my hanging “Worm Inn Tomato Garden” today. I am happy to report that the tomato plant seems to be doing fairly well, and we even have a ripe fruit already. As was the case with the other hanging tomato garden (which is also doing quite well), there was an initial period of decline – likely due to the stress associated with being flipped upside down after being grown to a decent size in a normal manner. The next time I do this, I will definitely start with small healthy plants and see if that makes a difference.

There seems to be a LOT of worms in the Worm Inn garden, and the level of material inside has been going down a fair bit. I have added one bag of old green tomatoes (diced) from last year, but have otherwise not added any food scraps. The worms seemed to appreciate the gooey rotten tomatoes, even though they started to stink and grew a nice coating of mold (I didn’t really bury them very well) – I decided to spread them around a bit just to be safe.

The other day I topped up the system with a nice thick layer of rotten straw mixed with old goat manure that happened to be sitting in one of my backyard composters. I think this will help to ensure that the worms continue to have a nice habitat zone, even with the tomato roots continuing to encroach on their space. One of the things I’ve noticed about the bucket systems is that the tomato roots basically take over the entire vessel, likely making it next to impossible for a populations of worms to live in there as well. I think the worms are doing better in my big box systems though (will provide an update on those soon) since there is more space for them, and I have created a habitat/food zone for them near the surface in the middle of the beds.

I am definitely interested to see how the Worm Inn tomato plant grows from here. While certainly looking nice and healthy, both hanging garden plants are still quite a lot smaller than most of the other Tomatoberry plants I have growing in various containers and beds.

Will provide another update in a couple of weeks or so!
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Paul Letby, our Canadian “Lasagna (vermi) Gardening” correspondent (haha) recently sent me an email update, and encouraged me to share it with RWC readers (thanks again, Paul!). If you missed Paul’s first installment, be sure to check it out here: Lasagna Gardening with Red Worms

Hi Bentley! I thought I’d send a little update to keep you up to speed on my garden. (not that things are moving that fast in the garden… they’re plants! Ha ha!)

I’m beginning to see a difference in the results I’m getting based on construction of the beds. I didn’t mention it before, but the vermi-bed is built differently than the rest, and is getting much better results up to now. The compost ecosystem bed is built the same as the big bed and is doing much better as well, and that may be due to kitchen scraps. I’ve included photos of tomatoes in the big bed and from the vermi-bed, from the same flat, planted the same day with my garden shears for perspective.

The garden that I labeled the vermi-bed is the one I built differently. It’s layered from the bottom up with cardboard, manure, sod then grass clippings and straw. The sod introduced soil into the mix, and I think that the complex ecosystem in the soil has helped the plants alot. I had torn up the sod into small bits, so it didn’t really form any kind of barrier. I did get some perenial weeds sneaking up here and there, and I’ve come up with a strategy to eliminate them in the fall.

Then there’s the compost ecosystem bed. Now I haven’t added enough material to have an exploding worm population at all, so I can’t give them credit…yet. I have however been adding maybe 3 pounds of kitchen scraps a week in the form of home made manure between the plants, pulling up straw, depositing, then recovering. I also do this with the vermi-bed. Even without redworms, something’s been taking care of it all, as by the time I get back where I started, the home made manure is pretty much compost. I think that maybe the native soil dwelling worms may be coming up to eat. There are alot of them in the soil here.

Here’s also some pictures of a bed under our apple tree that my wife helped me build. My sister gave me more pansies than I knew what to do with so in they went. We built this with cardboard, fresh green weeds with no seeds, some nearly finished compost that had some of that sod in it, and topped with some dried grass clippings. I had cut this bed out of the sod last year and planted some irises in there, but it quickly became overrun with weeds. You couldn’t even see the irises! Much better don’t you think?

So in conclusion, I think SOME soil is a good idea in our layered gardens. It made a big difference in nutrition to my tomatoes and in how much water these gardens need. I also think that over time this will be less of an issue. Each fall I plan on adding more material to each bed: Dead leaves, grass, fallen apples, more kitchen scraps, garden waste of all kinds. That should make these beds more fertile each year. Also the action of the redworms and native soil worms should basically till the beds for me, mixing them well.

Til next time!

Paul