Hello welcome back everyone to the epic gardening podcast my name's Kevin I'm the founder of epic gardening.com

Definitely go check out the website if you want some of the coolest gardening tips on the internet

All right today we're talking about earthworms in your

soil. What are the benefits of them and why do we care that earthworms are in our

soil? Well, one of the main reasons we care is that earthworms are very fundamental to the construction of good soil.

So what they do is they'll tunnel through your soil searching for stuff to eat.

And what worms eat is organic matter so a banana peel a

couple leaves of kale paper shreddings they'll eat all that stuff and they will run through it really quickly. They actually are very, very hungry creatures

And they'll turn that into worm castings and worm castings is just a fancy, nice word

for worm poop, and is best thought of

as you might think of Kalinor.

It's the processed, excreted waste of a worm. And that's great for nutrition because you're taking a complex piece of organic matter like maybe a banana peel.

Worms are eating it and they're breaking it down into

its component parts so it can be utilized by plants.

And that's a great thing because you don't need to do it yourself. The worms are doing it all for you. So worms also, as they tunnel through your soil, help aerate the soil. So they're going to loosen it. They're going to add space to it, they're going to

decompact it, which is great.

And what that helps your soil do is accept more water and have more oxygen and aeration in there as well.

Loser soils are generally favored by plants because the roots are able to get deeper and access more, which means that the plants end up being healthier.

So they're able to dig deeper for more nutrition or more water and just absolutely explode. So how do we make sure that more worms are in our soil? Maybe we don't have too many.

Well, there are a couple of best practices that you can get into to make sure that your soil is worm friendly. The first

is to avoid deep tilling your soil. If you deep till your soil you risk damaging

the earthworm burrows, sort of the pathways that they travel through.

...