John,
I read your latest post about converting your garden. My raised beds I started this year were filled kinda lasagna style with aged horse manure, leaves, pine needles, coffee grounds, whatever I could find last spring. I tossed a little dirt in there (ok, it was some really sandy fill dirt, but I figured it added some sort of mineral content). The bulk of my garden is compost materials. When the garden finished this fall, I very much wanted to dig down to see if there was anything recognizable left in there, but the worms were so thick in there, I felt bad digging around in their world. As far as I did dig, it was all broken down.

The beds shrank down by about a third over the season as everything was broken down. I added some more manure and leaves etc this fall. I poked down through the top layer of leaves to check progress, and the worms are making their way through the new stuff as well.

By the sheer number of worms are we going to be growing in pretty much pure compost, or worm castings??

gb, how well did your garden produce the first year? I was also surprised how quickly the worms moved up into the beds and how many. ThatÂs why I am not too keen on using landscape fabric.

John

Here is a link that might be useful: Johns Journal

I was pretty happy with how well it did, so I expanded it...

A lot of my worms were imported with the aged horse manure, but I'm sure there were some around here somewhere. About the only digging I did was to level the wood frames and to try and loosen the ground underneath somewhat but I think I saw one, maybe two worm in the ground when I was digging.

I actually made my husband come outside to look at all the worms I found in the garden last week. He was not nearly as excited about it as I was...

I'm linking my previous post about how the new garden produced if you'd like to check it out.

Here is a link that might be useful: Veggie garden