Ask Gardenerd: Where Should the Worms Go?

Depending on what type of worms you are seeing, they can be very beneficial for your garden. If you have red wigglers, they can often be beneficial to the soil beneath where you just pulled them out of, they can aerate the soil and provide a vast amount of nutrients that will be good for the soil. You can move them, but certain worms will destroy the eco system that they are living in, so if you have red wigglers, you will be better off leaving them.

Key Takeaways:

A simple way to figure out if worms are coming from the soil beneath your compost is if you didn’t add the worms to your compost bin, they’re probably native species.
You can move worms from your compost to the garden soil as when new worms are hatched the nutrients left behind will help aerate your soil.
Ultimately whether you want to move the worms or keep them in the soil, it’s all up to you. Worms will repopulate on their own either way.

“There are some imported species of worms (specifically the jumping worm) that, having migrated into wooded areas in Northern United States, are destroying forest ecosystems.”