patience grasshopper. Red wigglers need some sort of bedding source. Food scraps should be used as a food source.

You may want to investigate composting with black soldier fly larvae(BSFL). They can survive with the scraps being their bedding and food sources. They will harvest themselves. When you have a good colony of BSFL, you'll notice the population of the pesty house fly reduce. BSF is not a pest fly.

Patience IS the important thing to remember. But I can tell you that if you have enough worms in that landscape (eventually), those worms will turn it into black gold. It just takes time.

To maximize the reproduction rates of both your VC and worms, you'd be a lot better off to control the environment those worms deal with. Temps, moisture, predators.

You'll make more worms and VC faster with bins in protected environments.

After you've got more worms than you know what to do with, you can unleash them on all that bad soil.

Chuckiebtoo

There are as many different kinds of "horrible"dirt as there are folks.
You might tell us where and specificly what dirt you have. I guarantee somone here has tamed the same dirt and made it productive.

Yes, you do need to give some thought to the carbon and nitrogen ratio. What you want to do is start with a lot of carbon, and add nitrogen gradually over time. The alternative would be to mix them in optimum proportions, let the pile heat up, then add worms after the pile cools.

Your idea could work if... You have a LOT of organic matter to start with. The OM breaks down to a much smaller volume than you started with.