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Good/bad? European night crawlers in the greenhouse?

7 years ago

I've got a fairly neglected European night crawler bin, and wondering if they would be good or bad in a self contained raised bed inside a greenhouse? Huge bed, deep and fairly rich.

Unsure if they will eat roots or live parts of plants?? Assuming not, BUT they've been pretty amazing at eating fairly fresh produce and don't want to ruin the greenhuse! Thanks

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Comments (3)

theparsley
7 years ago
Is this raised bed closed in some way on the bottom, or is it open to the soil below?

I don't have direct experience with European nightcrawlers. It's my understanding that they do burrow in soil, unlike red wigglers, but that they still don't burrow as deeply as you'd expect wild nightcrawler species to do. I would not worry about the worms eating your live plants - no earthworm will do that - but I would wonder if the worms' digging would disturb your plants, especially if you have small plants or seedlings that might get uprooted. And would the worms want to spread out and disperse, leaving the greenhouse, or would they be unable to get out and cause havoc by being over-populated and digging all over the place?

Either way, you'd still need to see that they have food, probably via a nice deep leaf mulch on the soil or something like that.
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fireweed22
Original Author
7 years ago
Jeez I responded a week ago but it didn't stick. Thanks for the response!

The GH is placed on a compacted gravel foundation but I'm pretty sure if they choose (too hot, dry, wet etc) they will be able to pass through into the ground below. It drains water well.

The soil I've filled the greenhouse with it quite rich with compost and bet they'd enjoy it for some time but also do not plan to add anything but finished compost, so not at all a like a worm farm adding organic matter to mulch the bed surface.

I think I will just add them, in hopes they will aerate the bed somewhat (the GH is about to go up and the soil will likely be trampled and compacted somewhat during construction). If they stay that's great, hoping overpopulation will escape into the garden beds surrounding the GH with more mulch options.
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Pitcom, I could only find one online resource that mentioned this, and it really gives no explanation. I will include the link anyway. The only other sources I have are word of mouth from farmers, in my area and the area my parents live in as well as up in Maine. Explanations have included thinning of the cell walls, loss of the antifreezing properties of their tissues due to heat exposure, or just general tenderness of the rapidly formed new growth. Again, this seems to be something that doesn't normally happen, so I guess it hasn't really been studied. At the risk of being obvious,something is happening this year that seems to be so far outside the norm that the various weather predictors are off, sometimes by by a considerable amount (my personal record here was 18 degrees off from predicted to recorded). It's like Mother Nature is saying "put this in your simulations and model it!" Normally, and I mean for many years, I have found my local weather to be consistently accurate within 5 degrees... Anyway, we seem to be heading into a stretch of weather that looks normal, so maybe it is all settling down? Sorry for your losses, it is really frustrating. Here's the link, the mention is right in the first paragraph. Here is a link that might be useful: Freeze after heat
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When we moved here, we had a similar 'invasion' of night crawlers - the things would leave a big enough hump of soil that it made walking on the lawn difficult, and when it rained, they would cover the sidewalk. It was interesting to watch them spread around the place, over the pond dam to the other side, moving about 20 feet a year. They've all but disappeared now. They coincided with the years when I was getting huge amounts of horse manure for the gardens, and they loved that stuff. Now, lots of worms, but I don't think I've seen one of these things in several years.
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Thanks for the reply Pete. I think a bigger bin might help, but I can't get too wild with this. My bin is about 15"x 30", so not super tiny. Interesting that you mention I still might have euros, I'm starting to think that too. I looked at many sites yesterday and I found a guy that had a video of his redworm bin. He was commenting on how nice and big his redworms were. They were clearly smaller and thinner than my current worms. So my current worms are apparently bigger than redworms, but they are a good bit smaller than the worms sold in Walmart and as panfish worms. I heard the smaller panfish worms were euros at Walmart. Thinking back, many of my redworms were thin and tricky to thread on a hook. There were some bigger ones in there too, so maybe I had a mixed batch and the euros took the lead after I almost dried them to nothing this winter. I'll try attaching a photo of worms on a 3x5 card. I am in the mid-hudson valley area of NY. We live on a lake. I'm not a die-hard fisherman, but with the lake right here, I pretty much have to throw a line in whenever I have a few minutes to kill. We have sunnies, perch, crappies, catfish, bass and pickerel. No trout here. My more serious fishing friends laugh at my small worms, but they catch fish.
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You can buy about ten cups of Wal-Mart trout pan fishing worms for about $2.00 a cup. That would give you around 300 ENCs nearly a pound for twenty dollars. Well when I first bought mine they were a little small because they were refrigerated and living in castings(no food). But now I am feeding them rabbit poo and they are huge.
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theparsley
7 years ago
Hmm, if the soil really does get compacted during construction you might want to take mechanical measures to de-compact it (i.e. rake it up a bit) at the outset rather than counting on the worms to do it all. Of course I am a BIG fan of letting worms do as much of my digging as possible, but they don't have masonry drills in their pointy little noses either.

Worms are pretty good escape artists when they want to be; they can wiggle through very small openings and travel overland too when the conditions are damp and dark enough. I'm pretty sure they will find their way out of your greenhouse if they don't like it there. And if your greenhouse is a place that worms would like, other worms will probably find their way in anyhow.
fireweed22 thanked theparsley

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