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Compost vs Vermicompost

Vermicompost is the soil produced by composting with worms. It is a mixture of tail end worm excretions (called worm castings), mucous secretions from their body walls, and partially composted remains of high lignin materials and others that don’t completely break down when composting.

There is nothing wrong with conventional composting, but when you add worms to the process, you get a product that is far superior to any compost produced without their help. Worm castings are a mixture of particles smaller than 2 microns. They are better than ordinary compost at improving soil’s water retention, aeration, drainage, and stability. They are much higher in natural plant growth hormones, and have much better antibiotic properties against pathogens. The mucous secretions are a source of available nitrogen.

The nutrients in worm castings are more available to plants, but still don’t force-feed them. Minerals are made available sooner by the huge biomass of a special mixture of bacteria selected by worms to be present in their castings. A good portion of this biomass is nitrogen fixing, taking nitrogen out of the air, and converting it to available forms. Fungi might not be as plentiful in worm castings as some ordinary composts, but when applied to even poor soil, huge colonies of mycorrhizae and other beneficial fungi quickly form; probably because of the little-understood extremely complex perfect nature of worm castings.

While this is rarely a problem at home, an interesting thing to note is heavy metals that might be in the worms’ food are locked so tightly into the soil matrix they are made unavailable to plants. This doesn’t happen in ordinary compost. Given enough time, earthworms also reduce all bacteria that are pathogenic to people and animals to a level of zero.

This article could go on and on. There are many more advantages of vermicomposting over conventional composting, and even more are being discovered every day. There are of course advantages the other way involving feasibility and economics, but as far as the finished product goes, vermicompost is your best dirt.