If you've been wondering if you can just take worms out of your race bed and toss them

in a compost bin or vice versa, take your composting worms and throw in your race bed,

then this episode should answer those questions for you Epsteeve Churchill back on the show,

founder of the Urban Worm Company and the creator of our favorite worm bag, it's the Urban

Worm Back. So Steve, we get this question, I can only imagine how often you get it and

maybe it makes sense to just explain the different types of earthworms that are out there.

Sure, yeah, so you kind of encapsulated it well in the initial question, which I get this

all the time and what's funny is I lose a lot of sales on my website from people who

call me and I try to steer them in the right direction. So here's a thing is that there

are actually three categories of earthworms and there's about 7,000 to 9,000 different species,

but only about five to seven of them and I mean not five to 7,000 but five to seven of them are

any good for a composting. So it's helpful to look at the three categories. The first one is

anisic worms. These are very muscular, vertical burrowers. These are what people think of when they

think of night crawlers, these guys will go down six to nine feet below the surface because they

kind of have that musculature that allows them to kind of dig and aerate. And these are the worms

that really aerate the soil for you. Those are not composting worms. If you go kind of one step

down in the muscularity column, you've got endoggic worms, which again, less muscular, they tend to be

more horizontal burrowers in the top soil. They're going to have a much more pale coloring as well.

Then the anisic worms, those are also not vermicompostors. All vermicompostors are what are called

the epigenic variety. And epigenic is, it's either Greek or Latin, I forget, I think it's Greek

for on the earth. So these are not soil dwellers. These are really kind of scrawny, non-muscular

worms and they don't burrow. They don't burrow horizontally, they don't burrow vertically, and they

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