I have never heard or read about composting worms causing problems with plants growing in the garden. I suspect your cabbage has another problem, and the worms are feeding on the decaying material. I add lots of castings and worms to my garden beds and have had no 'worm-pest' problems with leafy greens.

Rain + compost (or manure) + rain = volunteer composting worms where I live. We have had copious rainfall lately!

Welcome to the forum and good luck with your cabbage. Don't blame the red wigglers.

Pete

I can't say for certain if they were actually eating my plants, but I did find some red wigglers on my spinach plants this year. The lower leaves had a concave shape that held water, and I saw them floating there after a rain.maybe they were just looking for dry ground and not a meal, but I thought that was interesting because I had never seen that before.

Senor/Senora dcp123......

I am making assurances to you now. Our worms do not eat living vegetations. Under circumstances not at all. I know this because it may be the most basic thing I know with my experiences with the worms.

If you maybe have a wild mushroom blossom inside your worm bin, the worms will not consider the eating of it. Pull it from its roots, drop it into the bedding and the worms will consume it at their discretion.

I can assure you this.

CarlosDanger

I have never read anything about compost worms eating living plants. If they did... there would not be many living plants.

Once I found a worm in the floor cloth stuck in a bucket stuck on the terrace, about 7 or 8 feet from the soil. How this worm got there I don't know, it must have belonged to the cirque du soleil of the worms.

dcp123, I've got compost piles full of worms, the 3 types, eisenia fetida, andrei, and hortensis, and last year I planted tomatoes, zukes and squash in the piles. I let them all crawling on the ground. They had early blight. They grew among high grass. Toms rotted on the ground. So all the worse conditions were there for worms to indulge in gluttony. Well they didn't. Though slugs and snails did.

So if my 3 species of worms didn't bother with eating tender plants crawling on the ground, they can't be guilty of eating your cabbage.

Moreover, they hate light, so I don't think they'll come out even in the night to climb on a living plant.

They don't even eat living roots ! I wish they did, they would have eaten all the fatty stolons of the bermuda grass that invaded my compost piles !

Thank you all for your responses. I got a laugh from Otis11 and a lovely image of an acrobatic worm from FrancoiseFromAix.

Well, I don't know what variety of red earthworms are in my compost bins, but I can say three things with great certainty:

1-I have thousands of red earthworms that hate light eating decaying matter in my compost bins.

2-I have red earthworms between the layers of my cabbages where there is no light that appear similar to those in my bins, although they are on the smaller-than-average side for the ones in the bins. .

3-These earthworms may be in some areas where there is leaf material that is dead as a result of the base of the leaf having been eaten through, but are also in holes in healthy leaves.

My operating theory is that perhaps something else (slugs? a rodent? probably slugs) ate at the base of some of the leaves in the head of cabbage, then some of the Cirque de Soleil worms went exploring and found yummy dead plant tissue in a nice, dark place (inside the cabbage) and started eating. Your worms may not do this, but it's consistent with the idea that these worms eat decaying tissue. Then comes the controversial part: The worms moved on to eating live cabbage tissue. I don't know of any other way to explain all the worms sitting in the middle of holes in a healthy cabbage leaves.

Maybe your worms don't do this in the conditions in your garden, but it certainly appears that mine have done this in my garden. Maybe my worms are a different species, maybe the cabbage was challenged by some other attack first, but I've got quite a lot of cabbages, each with dozens of red earthworms happily munching away to contradict any idea that no earthworm ever eats any living plant anywhere under any conditions.

Here's a link to a video I just found that shows an earthworm (not the variety I have) pulling pieces of leaves off of a living plant. The video starts with it tugging on some dead material, but it yanks off a green leaf about 34 seconds into the video. Who knew they could do that? Whatever variety I have seems to have mastered eating live plants. I don't know if they can pull off pieces like that, but the video is very interesting.

Here is a link that might be useful: Some worms attack live plants.

Here's another interesting link I found. It's a BBC article about an article in the Journal of Soil Biology and Biochemistry documenting that Lumbricus terrestris sometimes eats seedlings. Now, I don't think I have Lumbricus terrestris in my compost bins or inside my heads of cabbage and the problem I have is not attacks on seedlings, but I figure that this articles is at least some evidence that the story is not quite so simple as earthworms never harming living plants.

Don't worry, I'm not going to try to exterminate worms from my compost or my garden beds, but I will try to think of a way to protect my next batch of cabbages. And, of course, even if my worms sometimes misbehave I'm not suggesting that any of your children/pets/worms would ever do such a naughty thing. I'm sure your worms are all very well behaved. And your kids too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Some worms eat seedlings

Keep in mind dcp, there is a difference between earthworms and composting worms. The links you posted both indicate earthworm species, not composting species.

I also have had a problem with small earthwormsI going inside the cabbage leaves and appearing to eat the leaves. It was only a problem where the garden was heavily composted and mulched. We have sandy soil here, so any organic matter attracts worms. I have to cut off the lower core and leaves, but the heavily mulched cabbages grew much bigger than the other cabbages anyway.

But, yes, it happens. Fortunately, the worm dirt washed right off. I will try mulching with fresh straw after the cabbages have begun to "head up" and see if that helps.

I harvested some red cabbage a month or so ago, and it had aphids deep inside the leaves.

Ok this is an old thread thats been pumped up, but the truth is red wigglers cant eat fresh healthy crops. They eat decomposing material that has or is being broken down by bacteria and it is really the bacteria they are eating. I agree that the crops in question have some other problem going on.

This was my first year using vermicopsting in my garden and my first year having worm holes in my turnips. Nothing else was negatively affected but every turnip was! I did see a little worm crawl out and it was not a magot or cabbage worm. It was a very tiny looking nightcrawler TINY!

On the flip side everything else did great.

Alaska