Growing With worms

since people use worm castings as fertilizer
if you use some organics so you dont kill them,
couldnt you just put some worms in your pot?

if the pot is big enough then they shouldnt drown when you water your plants


just a thought,
any comments?

What happens when they die or get out and sit on a tarp basking under a 400w light.....Whew that smell bro is the wores thing in the world. Just go get castings IMO maybe its better to use live worms I dunno

This spring when I move my Veggies out to the back deck, I will not be buying any soil. My area (nj) is supposed to have some super rich soil for matoes and such. I will simply go dig the dirt up and fill my pots up. If I get worms.. well I will concider tha a good omen. The worms will be a sign of great soil. I once had 5gal buckets setting in my yard down in houston around the edge of my raised garden.. I'll be damned if those worms didnt crawl into the buckets thru the drain holes. I always use a nice layer of course rock on the bottom for better drainage..guess it was easy access.

so i guess it may be just as beneficial as using worm castings as long as they dont crawl out and dry up under the lights haha

composting worms dont live in soil like that. They are just under the surface dwellers and wouldnt take to your soil buckets very well.

I can promise you, all the worms you try to put in your bucket will try to escape or die.

Compost worms are for just that........compost. Use them to eat up kitchen scraps (no protiens please) and other goodies.

Besides the fact that the normal cycle for MJ is much too fast for worms to compost anything in the buckets.

just a high thought, thanks for the input

hybrid said:

composting worms dont live in soil like that. They are just under the surface dwellers and wouldnt take to your soil buckets very well.

I can promise you, all the worms you try to put in your bucket will try to escape or die.

Compost worms are for just that........compost. Use them to eat up kitchen scraps (no protiens please) and other goodies.

Besides the fact that the normal cycle for marijuana is much too fast for worms to compost anything in the buckets.

Click to expand...

I wish I lived where I could compost....I need to move to some land damnit

Redrum said:

I will simply go dig the dirt up and fill my pots up. If I get worms.. well I will concider tha a good omen.

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What if you cut a worm in half when you dig the shovel into the ground? Will it still be a good 'omen'?

Hey its happened to me I felt a bit guilty.


On another note I grew some stuff in my bathroom using potting mix purchased at a store

i would feed it old fruit/vegetable skins on the surface of the dirt
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and guess what, i found a worm in the soil at one point

i have no idea how it got there, it was never outside

i left the worm in and enjoyed the rich black soil

ive used worms in my soil in pots before outdoors and they always stuck around. i dont know if they would enjoy the indoor enviornment though

this thread is very contradictory to my worm exeriences. when planting some seeds at the beginning of fall. i gathered some worms that i foundand put them in and buried them. the plant that they are in is still a nce green colorand is healthy as ever. i recentlyfound out that the worms arebreeding in therebecause a baby red worm came out the bottum. putit back in and thats the only one who has come out. they have the sense to stay in. not only do they rovde continual time release fertilizer. but they aerate the sol by moving around. all iknow is have enough worms to bebreedingin there andthe plant seems to ber lovn it. so i would have to disaree with just about everyting stated in this thread so far.imade a thread about it. its called accidental worm breeding. check it out

I have "red wigglers" in my indoor potted plant. I originally had put 2 in and when I transplanted there were 3 of them. They had a baby! Its natural fertilizer and aerate the soil. They are happy critters and help the plant grow. I found a science project online that proved plants with worms in the pot grew better than ones without. As long is there is enough soil for them to be happy then there shouldn't be a problem and in fact its good for them!

I've been "vermicomposting" for a good while now. It's simple, takes up little space, doesn't smell (if you do it right), and it provides me with gallons of free castings. The type of worms I use are "Red Wrigglers". I keep them in a big "Sterlite" tub with holes drilled in the bottom and the lid, in a dark corner of my flowering room. The extra CO2 generated from the natural process of decomposition, which the worms help facilitate, doesn't hurt my garden one bit. When I harvest the castings a few of the worms of course get mixed in, but when they're in the container, by nature they know to avoid light.They stay just below the surface. As long as you water your plants properly(not saying that you don't) the little guys/girls(worms are hermaphrodites) should hang around for the rest of their life cycle which can be up to a year or more. I keep saying that I'm going to write an article for HT on "vermicomposting", but "stoner-complacency" prevents me at the moment.

When i was a child my mother kept ALOT of houseplants, I mean like no tv in the living room just plants ALOT! Being the hippy that she is she added worms she saved from drowning in puddles to some of her plants, apparently over time ALOT of her plants. Well one day i was maybe7 or 8 and i was home alone for a few hours, I saw a few flies in the house on the window, Inside the next 30 minutes or so those few flies turned into literally 1000's of flies. By the time my mom got home she ran in the door cause she saw blood smeared all over the front windows. I had been killing flies 10 at a swing for hours. Dead flies and fly guts EVERYWHERE. There were piles on the floor under every window. Turns out they were called "cluster flies" Apparently the adult lays its eggs inside of adult worms. Then all at once as if by some weird psychic fly link they ALL hatch at the same time. Who knows how many worms mom brought in that were infected with fly eggs. So if you plan to put worms in planters inside, may i recommend maybe buying your worms instead of collecting them. Has to be safer. LOL Good Luck

Yea, worms in the pot is a bad idea.
Worms needs decaying organic matter to survive. How much rotting waste do you store in your containers?

If you want to take advantage of the benefits, start a worm composting bin. Make sure they get lots of green and brown vegetable waste. Harvest the castings and use as fertilizer.

I can't imagine 3 worms will become catastrophic, but I can absolutely guarantee two things:

1. The amount of fertilizer they create will do absolutely NOTHING for your plant. That is like trying to live off a third of a handful of breadcrumbs everyday.

2. #1 representing the best case scenario, the only possible effect you will ever see is when the worms finally die, and all kinds of nasty shit shows up for the feast..

naw man. god designed plants and worms with both of there needs in mind. they coexist peacefully

hybrid said:

composting worms dont live in soil like that. They are just under the surface dwellers and wouldnt take to your soil buckets very well.

I can promise you, all the worms you try to put in your bucket will try to escape or die.

Compost worms are for just that........compost. Use them to eat up kitchen scraps (no protiens please) and other goodies.

Besides the fact that the normal cycle for MJ is much too fast for worms to compost anything in the buckets.

Click to expand...

that's funny! because every time i have to transplant anything 1gal.or larger, I find worms that stayed...but they came with the "insane" compost. "besides the fact"that in addition to pooping out castings, thet help aerate the soil..but of course that's just way too crazy huh?

My worm farm is in a 5' diameter plastic "Kiddie Pool". I just threw in a bunch of cow shit, got 2 LBS. of worms in the mail, & threw them in. I planted in buckets, & they get too hot & dry for worms. Chemical ferts & poultry manure will kill them. A set-up like FDD's is perfect for planting IN the worm farm, IE; Digging trenches/big holes, & filling them with the worms & compost. I've tossed rejected seeds in my farm, and some has sprouted. I may use it for a germing bed, maybe even a cloning bed...

the odd case that 6 worms are in your bucket is neither perplexing me nor is something I would consider more than a simple anomalie.

The fact is, if you read about vermicomposting, you'd understand what the point is.

Red wigglers are composters, they need biodegradable material to live and thrive. Good soil has little to none of anything they need if its already been thru the process.

I read a study that said when you start holding off food from red wigglers they produce massive offspring in the effort to save the species. Supposedly they (the hatchlings) are stunted in size to allow for more quantities of them. This is how one breeder will ship you 10,000 worms for the price of a normal 1000. He sells by weight not count and will help you start your own colony by doing this very thing.

So when someone gets a nice big fat bucket, plants the clone or transplant and puts in say..........300 worms and some sort of clutter over the top and feeds the worms to get them established and then stops feeding them and even half survive I will scream "HOLY SHIT" and Im talking a 4 month turnout 2 for veg and 2 for flower...........very unlikely to happen.

Worms take several months to start producing anything worthwhile for compost which is much shorter than the average lifespan of the rogue weed grow.

I will concede that if done right, you could use them in an outdoor grow like FDD's if you went out and covered your ground with cardboard or straw or something and then went and fed them nightly just for them to produce the compost so it would fertilize the plants when water filtered thru it.

Even then we have 2 problems. Now you have more "pests" attracted to the free feedings and red wigglers dont do a great job of aerating the soil. They again are surface dwellers and night crawlers are deep dwellers who do the bigger part of the aeration.

I've heard that worms are very useful for aeration, not the castings. I'm very interested to give it a go, anyone got any first hand experience?

mbpdavies said:

I've heard that worms are very useful for aeration, not the castings. I'm very interested to give it a go, anyone got any first hand experience?

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Yea most of the people that posted in this thread..did you read it?