Earthworm Castings vs Potting Soil (PART 1) | VermisTerra and PRO-MIX

all right this is one of those experiments and videos that should have been completed many months ago and it is now the middle of november 2021 and i'm having to redo this entire project although i did post a video on the first attempt at this uh talking about something else that actually happened and we'll experiment with that in this video as well but if you haven't seen that video and if you're interested to see what happened in the first one you'll find the link at the end of this video so basically just reiterate what we got going on here in a nutshell i'm basically testing to see how plants grow in the beginning stages anyways in soil and in earthworm castings so over here at pro-mix i use this stuff a lot and i love starting starting seeds in this and over here this is a new product called vermistera and it's just pure earthworm castings i tried using this in my garden this past summer you'll also find a link at the end of that and at the end of this video for that video in my watermelon garden so this container over here this is just these are five inch nut pots for hydroponics i just covered the outside with old socks we got soil over here and earthworm castings over here uh pure earthworm castings and in the middle here we have a 50 50 mix of both and on the top here what i basically put in here is four fresh pepper seeds in each one of these and then i put in 12 tomato seeds and scattered them around fairly evenly on the top of each one so what i'm actually going to do here is i'm going to put just a little bit of dusting on top of each one of these with the pro-mix just to cover the seeds a little bit i'm going to probably cover the containers with a plastic or something like that just so they germinate and then we're going to come back and take a look and kind of see what happens all right it has been five days and all of these here are the tomato seeds that actually sprouted these all sprouted actually on the third day and i am using a heat mat here that does help a lot with germination and i did actually use this cover here to keep the humidity in and the heat in while they were germinating but i took this off after the third day um so it's been two days this since they've been uncovered i still have the heat mat on and i expect the pepper seeds to come up pretty soon as well typically pepper seeds when i germinate them uh with the heat mat it's about seven to ten days maybe maybe it might be a little bit sooner in this case because the seeds are more fresh but we'll see now as far as the germination rate goes these all pretty much look about the same uh these two here the soil and the 50 50 mix of the soil earthworm castings are pretty much identical when they first came up these over here though were a little bit slower behind for some reason i'm not quite sure why that is you can see all these here these leaves are a little bit smaller that's because these sprouted later than the rest of these over here now as far as the reason why i think that these germinated better than i tried the first time with this experiment is because i laid the seeds on top of all these soil earthworm castings and i only sprinkled like i said just a tiny bit of the soil on top just to cover the seeds just barely enough so if anyone was asking what lights i'm using here i didn't mention this yet but these are qg led light strips i've had plenty of videos where i've used these uh for the past couple years and these are a little outdated at this point but they work uh they work really well so these are the ultimate ones all right it has now been 10 days since i planted these seeds and right on time the pepper seeds have germinated so there is one right there and then there is one right there uh and there's two back there those are the four that i planted in there um and this one here there's four coming up there and over here in the earthworm castings uh there is only one there and then there's another one sprouting right there and then the other two um they have not come up yet but we'll see if they will so we'll come back and update this in a few more days all right it has been a few more days and it's gotten to the point now where it's time to start thinning out the ceiling so we can continue on with the experiment but before i thin them out i wanted to talk about a couple things that i've noticed here and for one there's no real significant difference in the germination right they all seem to be doing just fine except for this over here in the earthworm castings there is two pepper seedlings that are two pepper seeds that did not germinate at least not yet so only two seedlings came up in that one and all four came up in the soil and the 50 50. the second thing to note is if you look over here in the soil these seedlings are growing a little bit faster and they're a little bit larger because of that to where if you look in the earthworm castings the pure earthworm castings they are not growing as fast and they are a little bit smaller the 50 50 mix it seems like a mix of both if you ask me the the height and the the rate of growth and also the color and it's going to be hard to see on camera here but there is a difference in color if you look over here in the soil mix these are a little bit lighter green than the ones growing over here in the earthworm castings it's pretty obvious here in person i don't know if it's going to come across on camera all that well they're not they're not a lot darker but it's it's obvious when you look at it in person it's not a bad thing if you look over here in the soil i mean this these look completely normal and healthy no one would think otherwise they're not light green or anything like that um i guess if you compare it to those over there maybe but it's not abnormal whatsoever i believe that the reason why these are darker green there's only usually two reasons why a plant is darker in color darker green and that's usually nitrogen or iron they might have more of that in the earthworm castings so i'm going to go ahead and actually cut out most of the seedlings in each pot so we can continue on and grow them larger it just wouldn't be possible to grow them large like as they are i'm just trying to keep this small scale i'm going to leave two tomato plants in each pot and two peppers two pepper plants in each pot and we'll see what happens when we come back all right i finished trimming out most of the seedlings in each one of these pots and i've left two pepper plants and two tomato plants each just like i said it would and i've actually trimmed out the larger ones that were in the soil here because i wanted to match the plant sizes in each one of these pots here just to make sure they're the same growth figure and everything to make it as fair as possible the pepper plants over here in the soil or i should say the pepper seedlings these here are about the same each and over here we have one that sprouted probably just a little bit later so it's a little bit smaller and then we have one here that's a little bit larger and i did the same thing over here in the earthworm castings so we kind of have a good mix of everything here as as much as possible so we're going to give it a few more days and come back and kind of just see what happens okay it's been a few more days and that means it's now time to leave the best of the best and get rid of the rest that sounded kind of corny what that actually means is what i'm going to do here is i'm going to remove uh one of the tomato plants and keep one in each one of these spots and i'm going to do the same thing for the pepper seedlings down there as well so i'm going to remove whatever is there and leave one which would be the best of the best basically um so what you can actually see here is i've got uh the two tomato plants here in the soil which are pretty much the same i've got two tomato plants in the 50 50 earthworm casting soil mix one's taller one shorter i'll be getting rid of the shorter one and doing the same thing over here in the pure earthworm castings and then leaving one of the best seedlings and actually there was one additional seedling that came up a few days ago here in the pure earthworm castings the fourth one has not come up which it probably won't so i'm gonna cut these out we'll come back and i'll just show you what i have left okay here's what's left and they all pretty much look identical and they're pretty much all exactly the same height and even the pepper seedlings here i've kept the ones that were pretty much identical so we're going to let these grow out as much as they can in these pots i'm not going to be adding any fertilizers whatsoever just water it's just going to use up whatever's in the soil i don't want to add any fertilizers throughout this because that's kind of unfair i think the point of this is really just to be looking at how they grow in the soils as they are so probably give it a little while here maybe a week or two we'll come back and take a look all right it has been one more week and i have something interesting to report we're finally starting to see some differences here so first we're going to start here with the pro-mix the potting soil mix you can see here that the tomato plant is starting to develop a classic nitrogen deficiency how do you know that the lowest leaf here the very first leaf which is the seedpod leaf turning yellow almost brown the next leaf up here is starting to become less green and more yellow and i i know i talked about before how this particular plant in the potting soil didn't have quite as green leaves versus the other ones well now it's starting to become more yellow and less green and then the very top leaf looks pretty much fine so that's the classic signs of the nitrogen deficiency not seeing the same thing here same thing here with the pepper seedling of course it's too early to tell for that but we'll take a look at that later on once everything progresses further over here in the 50 50 mix of the potting soil and earthworm castings we're seeing that this plant looks pretty much healthy it's very nicely green same thing with the pepper seedling although they all look the same at this point but if we compare this one here if you look at this lowest leaf the seed pod leaf this here it looks green and it looks very healthy but if we compare it to the one over here in the pure earthworm castings this here is definitely darker grain if you compare it to this one it's not a whole lot of difference if you were just look at this plant by itself you say oh it looks really healthy but compared to this one there is a big difference um obviously now if you look at the sizes of these we basically got here small medium and large and that's kind of playing out exactly as you would expect if you know you have 100 earthworm castings and it has all the good stuff in there the nutrients that the plant needs and then over here you have half as much because it's mixed with the potting soil and then all potting soil that's exactly what you would expect to happen now we're going to let these plants grow a little bit further and see how big they can get although this plant here is obviously going to be trailing way behind but that's also why we're growing not just two plants in each one but two different plants in each one to see how it affects each type of plant so we will be going along quite a bit here eventually this is probably not going to do too good this may actually die who knows but we'll still have a pepper seedling to watch in all of these now i also want to point out here that the reason why this plant is not doing so good in the potting soil is not the fault of the potting soil it's not the fault of the pro-mix whatsoever that potting soil doesn't have a lot of plant food or nutrients to start with it's a very light amount it works great for starting seeds and it works great for potting plants whether it's a house plant or something you'd pot in a plant outside but it's it's not meant to have a ton of fertilizers in it it's a very light amount and at this point here this is when you would start giving it plant food supplementally now eventually the soils over here like this one here the 50 50 and the earthworm castings eventually those are going to start needing additional plant food as well as the plants get larger you can't pot in a you can't plant something in a potting soil and expect it to just grow there forever without feeding it it just so happens that the pro-mix here doesn't have a lot to begin with so you'd have to start feeding it sooner but this is kind of the point of the experiment here is to kind of see what happens when we look at it like this so in the back you can actually see i did a short video on this that's the pro mix there the potting soil and that's the 100 earthworm castings where i'm doing the seed starting and trying to germinate seeds and if you saw that short video i'll go ahead and link it to this video but you can see that nothing germinated and as it has been two weeks now and nothing has came up in the earthworm castings and quite a bit has come up over there as you can see in the potting soil now people might think that you know there's too much pressure on the seeds because the soil is more dense i only sprinkled a very very light dusting on top of the seeds when i put them in there and i put a lot of seeds in there to try to give it the best chance possible for the comparison and still none of them have come up and it's exactly what i observed before when i did that experiment earlier so there's something in the earthworm castings maybe it's a ph difference or something like that i'm not sure because i haven't tested it but there's something in the earthworm castings that's preventing germination okay it has been four more days and there are some things developing here that i feel are worthy of discussion uh first off you can clearly see there's becoming a more defined difference between these plants so the soil small the 50 50 earthworm castings medium and then the pure erythema casting is large as you can clearly see the earthworm castings are having an effect just looking at those plants next up here is the nutrient deficiencies and we're seeing the exact same thing happen in the pepper seedlings now you can see here these leaves are starting to turn a very lime green to yellow color the old ones the new ones here coming out the top the first shoe leaves are still okay and over here in the 50 50 it looks about the same these are just a little bit greener on the first sleeves here and then over here in the pure earthworm castings it's a nine-day difference so this pepper seedling here is growing the exact same way as this tomato plant and that there is not really any nitrogen deficiency there's no yellowing of the leaves and it's actually growing a little bit faster and we're seeing the same thing over here it's just growing a little bit faster than the one that's growing over here so there's a clear difference between the amount of nutrients the plant is absorbing in these pots and what's interesting here what i was pointing out with the uh air pruning method here or i should say the root printing method with using these socks is you can see the roots poking through down here that's just that's partly because i've been bottom watering these and so the roots have been growing into the water that would sit there and sit in there for a little bit of time however once this dries out because this is still moist these roots will prune themselves and if they didn't have this if they weren't poking through they would start to wind around the pot and that would become root bound so this root printing method here air pruning air pot whatever you want to call it is very good for potted plants especially fast growing plants like something you grow fruits and vegetables in so we're going to let this grow a little bit further and we'll come back and see what happens all right it has been another 10 days and we are now seeing a nitrogen deficiency across all three of these plants now including the one growing in the pure earthworm castings and you can see that here with the lower leaves turning yellow same thing with the pepper seedling and because of that deficiency i have observed stunted growth on all three of these plants so pretty much they have not grown since the last segment of this video and they're not looking happy either now we've been talking about nitrogen for a little bit here in this video and it's pretty obvious that you have a small plant and a large plant over here so if you look at this plant it's pretty much twice the size of this plant over here which has less nitrogen and you can see that here in the potting mix the total available nitrogen in there says 0.3 percent and over here in the earthworm castings it's point six percent so basically you have double the available nitrogen in the earthworm castings versus this potting mix and you can see that here in the potting soil and the earthworm castings you can see there's i would say that would be twice as much because you've got twice as much growth and this one here started turning yellow at the bottom leaves first before this one did so and then of course you got the one in the middle which is a mix of both and it's right in the middle in between as far as the size goes so that makes a lot of sense but we're also going to look at one more thing and that's the ph of the soil all right what we have here is two water samples and the water i'm using here is rodi water so it doesn't contain any bicarbonate to influence the ph of this these samples here so i've taken a scoop of soil out of the planter that was in the pure earthworm castings and i put it in the water here in this one and this was from the one that was in the potting soil the pro-mix and i stirred them up and i've let them sit for 24 hours to settle out i've had them covered obviously too and so what we're going to do is here is take a little sample with this pipette here out of the earthworm castings and we'll see what the ph of this is this is a very easy way to test the ph without spending a whole lot of money because the the test kit for this is relatively cheap now the earthworm castings to start out is a ph of seven it's a neutral ph i've tested that twice already to make sure and what i've when i've been watering these uh plants i've been using tap water and the tap water contains bicarbonates so that can also influence the ph now i don't expect to see much of a difference difference in the earthworm castings unless the ph has been changing from something decaying or something like that i doubt it though so we'll go ahead and take uh we'll do like four drops in this you'll see the change right away all right so that's pretty green let's kind of stir it up just a little bit yeah so i don't think the ph changed much the color on this if i let it sit for just a second here that the color will change by just a little bit and that's pretty much looking exactly as it did before when i tested this uh when i just put the straight soil in there i did i wasn't actually taken out of the powder when i was originally testing it i was taking it out of the bag so now this has been sitting with the plant growing in it i'm just basically what we're looking at here is just to see if it's changed at all so that is about a ph of seven uh maybe [Music] maybe just a little bit higher than seven it could be or maybe a little lower it's hard to tell with these with this solution it doesn't really matter too much because your point one difference point two difference it's not really gonna really matter all that much we're looking for more dramatic differences so i'm gonna go ahead and rinse this out with some rodi water and we'll test the one that was growing in the soil all right i have all that rinsed out i'll go ahead and test the sample from the potting soil a little bit more than that there we go i'm suspecting this probably is going to be the same ph of 5 ish i don't know wow i'm surprised okay that is definitely not five anymore and what we're looking at here so five would be orange there and six would be yellow and that is not that is not yellow i've seen this before it's much brighter looking at so that's pretty close to a ph of 6.5 i would call that sort of in between a 6 and 6.5 so we'll call it 6.2 um even if i hold it up against here yeah so that would be i would call it 6.2 i would say that's just about perfect for a ph of in a soil so it's obviously the ph of the soil is obviously not affecting the growth because between a 6.2 and a seven uh ph difference in soil it's not really that big of a difference i've done testing with plants growing in different phs and hydroponics and stuff like that it's not um it doesn't cause a very drastic difference such as what you've seen here in this video so now we got a couple more things to talk about let's go back to the plants earlier in this video i said i wasn't going to be giving plant food to any of these plants during this process just to be fair and i think that was a correct decision because we're only looking at what's contained in the soil and if we were to give these plant food that would kind of obscure those results and i really like the results i saw here and because of that we're actually going to be doing another video where i'm going to be growing two plants one in the pro-mix and another one in the pro-mix but in the second one i'm going to be giving it this vitality which is basically a earthworm castings extract and we'll see if that has any effect on it and then we'll be doing a third video but i'm gonna discuss more about the third video in the second video so if you enjoyed this video if you want to follow along please subscribe click the like button and thanks for watching

Channel: Growing Answers

Views: 20,803

Keywords: Pro-mix, promix, vermisterra, vermis terra, earthworm castings, earthorm casting tea, potting soil, soil, castings, potting mix, vermistarra, vermis tarra, earthworm, eathworm casting soil, grow with earthworm castings, earthworm castings vs potting soil, potting soil vs earthworm castings, soil vs earthworm castings, earthworm castings vs soil, growing answers, vitality, earthworm casting tea, earthworm casting mix, earthworm castings mix, tomato plants, peppers plants, peppers

Id: xlqjLd36UTE

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022