If you’re serious about balcony gardening, or container gardening in general, I think you should perform worm transplantations. The occasional worm gets in with planting material of course, but the soil in containers and pots is usually pretty dead as far as larger animals are concerned. Certainly worms, which can’t climb up multiple stories of a building to get to your balcony, will not often be present in great numbers.
We all know the benefit of worms: they aerate the soil, eat dead material and deliver it back to the soil in the form of fertile castings. If, like me, you don’t want to change the soil of your containers every year, worms are essential in making fertilising your soil easy to do.
You can buy them at a worm farm of, but a kilo may be a bit to much if you only want them to live in some containers or pots. Also price wise, collecting the worms yourself is a better option. To do this, you need to know someone with a garden. Go there, turn over logs, look under paving slabs or water the soil, then put moist cardboard on top. You’ll find worms by the dozens, all for free and easy to pick up. I also included some woodlice, for the odd bit of wood I may have lying around.
If the person with garden you know doesn’t want you to turn over logs and look under pavers, you may want to reconsider your friendship.
Of course, not all worms are created equal. Some live deep down in the earth while others prefer compost heaps and the top layer of the soil. I’d recommend you to only take those that live in the top layer or the compost heap, as they are the ones that munch on the dead plant materials.
When plants grow, they use nutrients from the soil, so you need to feed the soil to keep up with the growing needs of the plants, no matter if there are worms in it or not. If you take parts of the plant to eat, like fruit, leaves or roots, you use some of the nutrients from the soil to sustain your body. Other nutrients from the plants are sadly lost as ‘human waste’ in the largest waste of resources the earth is currently experiencing: sewage.
As people who don’t even have a garden probably don’t have the means of composting their own humanure (the worms don’t eat fast enough to keep up with your production!), the next best option is to buy pelleted manure to feed your soil with. Also add nails and hairs you loose or cut off, combined with old plant materials your balcony- or container garden produces, as well as kitchen waste.
Especially the manure, but also the scraps and body parts, should contain the trace elements your plants need. If you can get your hands on it, garden compost (made by a gardener, not bought in an anonymous sack you don’t know the origin of) could also give you these needed elements, maybe even in greater abundance than manure.
Balcony gardening is limiting the possibilities will be great still. Certainly if you enlist the help of the rest of the animal kingdom.
14 May 2017 © Dirk Hulst of @mijntuin.
