A New Trial for Knights Rose's in 2007
Selected products available from knights Roses

We all know worms are good for the garden and good for the compost heap. They break down organic refuse into sweet smelling castings and leave a trail of liquid gold behind that is laced with a myriad of microscopic soil organisms that aid the uptake of plant nutrients by the plants in your garden. They leave behind a maze of galleries, to improve drainage as they plough their way through your soil extracting the decaying organic matter that nurtures their colony, processing it as they go to leave you a rich reward. While earthworkers are the unsung heroes in our gardens it’s the reddish compost worms that are farmed to produce these essential garden by‑products, due to their ease of management.

A curious benefit of the composting worms is that they need cellulose in their diet to sweeten the volume of organic material and that requires enormous quantities of low grade waste paper and cardboard or kraft product. Just imagine how useful that is to our environment and they don’t need any electricity to do it either, such as the massive recycling waste paper companies use.
The compost worms’ by‑products are basically the castings and all the micro‑organisms that they carry and the gold water that is their waste product.

You cannot capture these products easily from the earthworkers in your home garden soil, which is why Wormwork Technologies have set about culturing the composting worms at their plant near Millicent in SA’s south east, so we can all benefit from their organic by‑products. These worms even break down toxic residues, excessive chemical fertilizers and leave a rich thread of fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms in their castings that aid the uptake of the chemical and organic fertilizers that you can then add to your garden.

One of the great dramas of the 21st century home garden is the rapid accumulation of detergents (called surfactants by spray companies) in our gardens that have caused enormous sterility in the rhizosphere or root zone. Latest research at Hohenheim University in Stuttgart(1), points the finger at glyphosate as being the main contributor to this problem, due to the large quantities of surfactant that has been applied to some soils by gardeners who been guilty of using ‘a little more than the label suggests’. The sterilising effects are similar to chronic lime induced chlorosis, where the leaves of roses in particular turn almost white.

Using the worm liquids such as Wormswork’s liquid castings from the snap fit 2 litre spray pack, has seen a reversal in just weeks, as fresh micro activity is pumped back into a sterile soil. Being an excellent organic buffer it is mobile and greatly accelerates the up take of residual chemical nutrients in your garden caused by all manner of over feeding and general neglect of the living component of your soil. Article written by Malcolm Campbell maih, ba