Tyra Trevellyn said:

I'll tag my question onto this thread, but it's about common earthworms
("fishin' worms," etc.)

I have a currently cold compost pile with a good earthworm population of its
own. Is there any reason not to leave them there.....if the pile ever heats up
will they escape into the surrounding areas?

I've watched them come wiggling out when a newly-made compost pile
starts heating up. If it get's too hot, they will move.

Is this wrong-think? Do earthworms generally survive if you move them from one
environment to another? (I'm careful to include some soil/compost from their
previous home, make sure I've roughed up the new area a bit, and put some dried
crumbled leaves over them for shade.)

Young worms will sometime migrate in search of greener pastures; mature
worms prefer to stay at home. A large nightcrawler, for instance, has a
permanent burrow that it built while it grew and sticks to it most of the time.
(It does come out at night to pull in food or seek out a mate.) It would be
severely stressed if you tried to transport it far from home, and might not be
able to make the transition.

Treat your soil gently to be kind to the worms. Once a garden is dug and
established, the most you should aim to do is fluff the soil a little bit. A lot
of deep tillage can wreck havoc on the worm population.

Organic mulch on the soil surface will feed the worms. In the spring you
can often find the surface openings of nightcrawler burrows; the worm will
have pulled bits of dead vegetation and leaves into its burrow from all
around. Nightcrawlers also have 'latrine' areas where they cast waste
and soil from the burrow. In clay soils these large castings can be a
real nuisance, getting rock hard when they dry, leading some people to
try and rid their soil of worms.


Alfalfa meal or pellets will feed the worms and your plants.

A couple of general-knowlege worm links:

http://www.soils.umn.edu/research/ars/mn_worm.htm
http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/NEWSLTR/v3n1/sa-9.htm

Finally, while nightcrawlers (and some other now common worms) are welcomed
by farmers andgardeners, they are not native to North America and are associated
with problematic changes to the leaf litter and habitat of the forest floor and the
spread of invasive alien plants in areas where no native worm species occurred.
(And in areas which had native worm species, they have also been problematic,
driving down the population of native worms in southern forests.)

http://www.invasiveplants.net/impsal.htm
--
Pat in Plymouth MI

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(attributed to Don Marti)