I'm with Len. I think that all you really need is alfalfa and composted manure. Especially if your soil has a clay component, it's full of minerals already. Most places you can find free manure, if you're willing to shovel and haul it yourself (or get a big strong friend to help you, LOL). But at all the stables I know about, they might charge 5 to 25 dollars tops to load it for you into a truck. I take it home to the back yard and water it down a little layering, perhaps, with organic materials I get for free, and then put it under a tarp. It doesn't stink except a little when I'm unloading it, because I water it down and put it under the tarp and get it composting right away, and because it's horse manure and not as stinky as cow or chicken. Last time I was unloading, my neighbor smelled it and came over to tell me she wanted some. If I couldn't get horse, I'd get chicken or rabbit manure, you can get that by the truckload too. You can get the horse manure already "composted" meaning it sat there for 6 months, which is good. If you use horse manure on your soil before letting it sit 6 months it could burn your plants from nitrogen, or kill your earth worms because of the deworming medications that are given to horses. It doesn't have to be completely composted if you top dress your existing plants with it, but if you put it next to the roots it should be thoroughly composted. Or dig it into the ground the summer or fall before you plant and plant there in winter or spring. If I didn't want to go to all that trouble, I'd get a load of OFSA also known as Organic Farm Soil Amendment which is just composted chicken manure and rice hulls. $50. will usually buy you a full truck load. You can put it right into the hole and plant a rose. A cheaper way to go is to get mushroom compost, but usually they tell you to let it sit a couple weeks before you plant. I've had success with that, it's just composted horse manure and straw. If you decide to collect your own for free, I find my referrals for organic composting supplies on Ecology Action website, ecoact.org, or if that's not happening in your area, try craigslist, or a garden club, like the local chapter of the rose society, or the local grange. Good Luck, -Gala

At the link is a 2010 thread where I mentioned it - You can purchase any kind of clover seed pretty easily, the two that seem to be most recommended for the climate / soil are Dutch white and Strawberry, and I just over-seeded the lawn. I had to do this three different times - two acres of grass, some spots died off and needed re-doing. The only 'drawback' is a very healthy crop of dandelions - but if one gets over the initial idea that its a weed, and starts to think of it as a plant whose tap root brings up nutrients from far below, that they're edible, and those yellow flowers aren't all that bad, then you don't mind. Although this time of year, there's a forest of stalks out there..... Anyway, the lawn gets better and healthier every year. As for watching those huge worms/night crawlers migrate, it wasn't so much the pathways, just watching those mounds of dirt show up every morning. Here is a link that might be useful: link

A paint bag was designed to filter globs of paint from the rest, so bumps don't appear where you paint. I started using mesh bags like for onions, but too much of the compost was floating in the tea, which plugs up the water can. So the bag filters it nicely, and doesn't interfere with the bacteria growth. The reason people use 'teas' might be because it's another way to nourish plants effectively. We all composted to build up our soil, but to really get great results sometimes takes years, depending on how good your soil was. So now we have worm castings, and nobody can argue about their increased value over compost as a fertilizer. Through electron microscopes we now really know how plants feed, and it's through the interchange they have with bacteria. And they not only feed through the root system, but also their foliant. My view anyway.

Nappy... your guess of about 600 (euro per pound) is probably close however that is not too many for a 13 gal container. I started with two 27 gallon bins, about 2/3 filled and put about 3000 (red wigglers/euros mixed) in one bin and 5000 in the other. That was no where near high density. In the first four months the numbers way more than quadrupled without issues and last month when I added two more bins and split the populations the density was WAY more than what I'd started with in the original bins but know this, I did supply prodigious amounts of food continuously, and a generous part of it were powdered grains and other high protein items in addition to fruit and vegetable pulp. Before I ever introduced any worms into the original bins, I'd had the bins prepared already with the bedding of coir/peat and added soil/leaf compost and buried 10 pounds of juiced pulp under the bedding for about 3 weeks to get the microbe population started and so when the worms arrived in the mail I just dumped them into the bins and they had an immediately available food source from day one... and plenty of it. Within 2 days I found many of them burrowing through the middle of that pulp pile so I assume they were eating... it soon turned into a huge mass before the week was up. Your worms may be wandering out of the bin due to lack of a sufficiently ready food source. Yes, try to get some leaf litter in there or open a can of pure pumpkin or creamed corn or cooked spinach (packed without salt) and put it under the bedding and see what happens over the next few days.... you'll need to wait until a mass of worms begin mobbing it before turning the light off... in any case continue to keep the lid off the bin. Somehow I missed it that you've only had this worm bin set up for 2 days! (which should make it 5 days by now)... Worm bins are an ecosystem that will take time to develop so be patient and give it a week for the worms to settle in. Remember their whole environment was just radically changed and so it will take a few days for them to adjust.... just adjusting to the pH of the bin could take a few days...