worm poo power

I decided to harvest out my first lot of worm castings from the worm farm.  They've been fattening up on newspaper shreddings and lots of fruit - my worms are picky, they don't seem to care for veggies and prefer fruit.  Here's my first pile of castings.  It's hard to avoid picking out some worms when you dig the castings out of the worm farm so I borrowed this technique.  You make a pile of the castings and the worms instinctively go to the center where it's darkest.  Then you pull away the outer layers of castings a few times, giving them time to run away in between, until you're left with a little pile of mostly worms, which you put back in the farm to keep fattening up. 

The castings are wonderfully rich, like very soft clay, and no they don't smell like poo they just smell like dirt.  It's a pure, super-injection of moisture-retaining organic life.  You can put it as-is into the ground when you plant things, or it dissolves really easily in water into a kind of slurry, which is good for rejuvenating tired potting mix.  Some of my beds are a thin layer of good soil over a dense layer of inorganic builder's rubble, which makes it hard to enrich the deeper layers without disturbing plant roots.  But this liquid slurry should be able to seep down into the poor soil and help bring it to life.  I'm looking forward to seeing how worm poo power improves my garden!