For the love of red wigglers

What is blind, has five hearts, no stomach, and reproduces without mating?

The answer — esienia fetida — has become both a passion and a business for John Turner, an aspiring entrepreneur after 27 years of collecting week-to-week paychecks as a professional groundskeeper.

Turner raises red wigglers, also known as manure worms or red worms, by the tens of thousands. He estimated that at one time last summer he had about 1.5 million red wigglers in his backyard, digesting their way through hundreds of pounds of compost each day.

When Turner reaches into his compost bins and pulls out a clump of rich black dirt, he knows exactly what it is he holds in his hands: the transformed residue of onions, melons, other foods, newspapers, and organic materials.

There’s cash in that dirt. Worm castings, a polite term for digested organics, is the top prize, worth about $4 a pound or $100 a cubic yard. A microbe-enriched extract from the compost sells for $27 a gallon. And then there’s the worms themselves: $22 per thousand. He sells some nightcrawlers for use as bait, but the vast majority of his business and his passion are in the little wigglers.

The worms and their products are an earth-friendly way of reducing landfill trash and a soil-friendly way of providing nutrients for plants, Turner says. Chemical-based fertilizers provide nutrients for the roots, but they do nothing for the soil, he said.

“When you put worm castings in a potted plant, you’re actually building up the soil,” Turner said. “You’re putting microbes into the soil and making it a healthy community of living organisms and the plants just love it.”

The best evidence of the difference can be found in Turner’s own Christmas cactus. After four years of Miracle-Gro, the cactus never flowered, he said. After spreading a half-inch of worm castings around the plant, it flowered right away and “it’s been flowering ever since,” he said.

Turner believes so strongly in his worms, he quit his groundskeeping job after 13 years with the South Whidbey School District, and invested himself full-time into the business. He named it Elderberry Earthworm Farm because he spent so much time turning compost and experimenting while under his backyard elderberry tree.

“I am entirely happy in my life doing this,” he said. “I completely enjoy the meeting people, talking about it with others.” And, he adds, helping out the earth.

Many of his plant-loving customers are interested only in the microbe-enriched castings and extract. But, a growing number of people are also interested in the worms, he said, and the development of an efficient composting system in their own back yard.

Red wigglers are not the same as regular earth worms or night crawlers. Those common worms are burrowers and travelers, great for aerating the soil, but not for breaking down organics into soil. They won’t stay put.

Red wigglers, on the other hand, will happily remain wherever there is food and moisture. Give them table scraps — no meat, please — and they will turn it into the richest soil to be found anywhere. Give them wet newspapers and they will happily reproduce, with or without mates, and break the paper fibers down to castings.

They eat their body weight each day, meaning about 1,000 worms will turn one pound of organic material into castings daily, under optimum conditions. Kept happy, the worms will double in number in 90-120 days.

Turner has a series of bins, 4 feet by 4 feet, with up to 25,000 worms in each. The bins are on a rotation schedule so he always has compost in various stages of production. When one bin is ready to harvest, he uses a worm separator, a simple rotating drum pitched at an angle. Turner shovels in the compost and the castings quickly fall through a screen, while the worms and soils of various clumpiness fall out the other end in neat, separated piles.

When Turner became intrigued two years ago about the use of worms for compost, he started out with 10 pounds of worms, about 10,000 individuals. He promised himself he’d spend one hour a day studying and experimenting with the little buggers.

He admits the business is not enough to provide a living, yet. But, he hopes to grow, he said, and develop sales through the web. Meanwhile, he can be found Saturdays throughout the summer at the South Whidbey Tilth Farmer’s Market, talking to just about anyone who will listen about the earth-friendly benefits of red wigglers.

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