All my potted trees have earth worms in them. No problem. My soil is 2 parts pine bark 1 part Perlite 2 parts compost from my worm riddled compost pile.

Steve

I personally like seeing all the creppy crawlers in my soil, that shows you are feeding the ground and soul of your plants. Try spraying with insecticidal soaps or neem oil available organically. you can also just purchase standard bug spray that you run with the water hose but that can possibly mess with ecology of the soil.

Why wouldn't you want earthworms in the soil? They are not causing your trees problems, spider mites on the other hand can really hurt a tree, Hort oil will take care of them, gonna need at least 3 applications. They love low humidity so try and keep that up near your tree.

Hu - You can fix the mites with a thorough spritz with a mix of water and rubbing (isopropyl) alcohol in water. The solution % can be 50/50 or favor water at a 3:1 ratio.

Would you provide images, please?

I have a little different perspective re worms in pots. We like earthworms in our garden soils because they run comparatively large particles of organic matter through their guts, and it comes the other end in very tiny particles that are closer to a form that's usable by plants and other soil biota. They also help to aerate mineral soils and increase mineral soil aggregation. In the way of fertility, they don't add anything to container media you can't provide by way of fertilizer, and since their workday consists of an endless effort to break down soil particles, they actually reduce aeration in container media by hastening its structural collapse. IOW, if your soil is already well-aerated, there is more potential for them to be harmful than helpful; and, if you think they're a plus because they aerate the container medium you're using, consider the idea that if you need worms to aerate your container media, you're very likely already at a disadvantage because your medium would necessarily be holding too much water. Also, even if the worms did add aeration to a pot, whenever you water, the aeration largely disappears. Water movement through the medium causes migration of the tiny particles into the soil's macro pores and eventually toward the bottom of the pot. The net result is, you end up with a collapsed medium and a lot of sludge toward the bottom of the pot, both of which increase water retention in direct relationship to how small soil particles become.

If you focus on ensuring your soil will be structurally sound for the intended life of the planting, and shoulder entirely the responsibility of providing all of your plant's nutritional requirements, you're far more likely to see better results. Too, soils you can water to beyond the point of saturation w/o the need to worry that the soil will remain soggy so long that it significantly limits root function or wrecks root health. The cyclic death and regeneration of roots caused by over-watering is very expensive in terms of energy outlay, and results in loss of potential that can never be regained; this, because the energy required to regenerate lost rootage would have been allocated to an increase in biomass and/or an increase in reproductive structures (flowers/fruit).

How would you rate your experience re growing in containers on a 1-10 scale, 10 being very experienced? I only ask because, if our discussion continues, it would be helpful to know.

Al

If tiny curled worms are white then you have grubs in the pot. You might want to consider a rept with fresh soil. I have earthworms in containers and I don't have earthworms in containers. I have year round trees that I leave outside, hemlock, pears, peach, apple, etc., various sizes up to 30 gallons. inevitably I see worms in them. They will come out after a heavy rain in the bottom. Doesn't seem to matter one way or the other since I just perpetually add more bark mulch when needed anyway. They seem to appear out of thin air (it's truly amazing sitting still and watching one somehow crawl 15 or 20 feet in the dark at night on concrete....). But I don't encourage anything in my citrus or other pots that I grow under lights and spend half their yearly life indoors. I don't need to deal with that. it's also NOT cheap to grow a 5-1-1 blend with repti-bark. Other than microbes I don't want to encourage breakdown. I don't use compost or any organic fertilizers indoors. I assume microbes are there but no insects - if I saw spiders etc. I'd leave them. I get various stuff that comes in with the Citrus pots after summer but no earthworms