Early Seeding

Starting seedlings early always feels a bit rebellious. In our case, we snatch at the slightly less marginal weather of an early March day, open up the worm bin, and have at it.

While the ‘standard’ recommendation is to use sterile media for seedling trays, we are experimenting with a different approach. Our initial media in the vermicompost bin was peat moss and newspaper (the latter long since transformed to dirt). Since then, our Red Wrigglers (Eisenia fetida) and European Night Crawlers (Lumbricus terrestris) have been working the same transformation on our kitchen scraps and left-overs, recharging depleted potting soil, and generally living a happy, wormy sort of life. What’s digested comes out the other end as a nutrient dense, fine, loam-like substance: worm-cast. Perhaps even more crucially than nutrients, the castings are teeming with microbiology. The microbes serve not only as a defense for seed and seedling, but also, from the earliest moment, enter into beneficial association with them, feed them, preventing disease and pest alike while strengthening all for the rigors of garden life.

Long story short…no sterile media here! That said, its important to steer clear of the undigested/active sections of the bin. The worms must be left to work their magic first, before their trove can be pillaged!

Sifters were called for; both to filter stray worms and to size the soil for optimal seed-to-soil-contact. Here are our upcycled sifters. Our son Liam gets the credit here. We saw hardware cloth and broken 5-gallon bucket lid rims…He saw sifters!

Seeds sown…