We The Wild: Made By Worms, Backed By What?

You bought We The Wild's worm-powered plant food. You used their neem spray until the leaves went glossy. Maybe you clipped on their little USB sun lamp and tucked a compostable gnat trap into the rim of the pot. The packaging is lovely, the brand plants a tree, and everything is certified organic. And your plant is doing exactly what it was doing before: not very much.

Maybe you assumed you were using it wrong. You were not.

We The Wild (WTW) sells a certified-organic, genuinely gentle range of products wrapped in performance claims the evidence does not support. The certification is real. The tree planting is real. The neem in the spray and the sticky traps on your pots are real tools. But the headlines promise, "explosive growth," "energy shot," "200+ active microbes" that supposedly do the work, but rest on a foundation that mostly falls apart the moment you bring it indoors or look at things closely. The one product in their catalog that addresses what's usually limiting an indoor plant turns out to be the least substantiated of all, their grow light.

This is not a takedown of a dishonest company. It is a measurement of a well-marketed one. Let's dig in.

Let's Get You Up to Speed

This UG article will help you understand:

• What We The Wild actually sells, and what each product genuinely does versus what the label implies
• Why "made by worms" and "200+ microbes" mean far less in a pot indoors than in a garden bed outdoors
• Why a product that "can't burn or overdose" cannot also deliver "explosive growth," and why both claims appear on the same bottle
• What the missing lab reports do and do not tell you
• Why the Instant Sun grow lamp, the one product aimed at the variable that matters most, light, is the weakest item they offer
• Where your money is better spent

Got things to do? This is for you

We The Wild is a NASAA-certified (5544M) Australian brand selling a vermicompost-extract liquid food (around 3:1:4 NPK), slow-release pellets (around 4:3:2), a purified neem oil and lemon myrtle leaf spray, compostable sticky traps, and a USB grow lamp. The organic certification, the tree planting, and the recyclable packaging are all genuine. The neem in the spray and the sticky traps are legitimate tools used correctly. But the core growth claims lean on vermicompost research drawn almost entirely from fast-growing food crops under bright light, the indoor microbe story collapses in the near-sterile soilless mixes most houseplants live in, the "you can't overdose, the more the better" promise contradicts the "explosive growth" promise sitting beside it, the grow lamp publishes no PPFD, wattage, or spectrum data at all, and the lab reports the company offers to share do not seem to exist in any downloadable form anywhere. Nothing in the catalog addresses the single variable that actually limits indoor growth: light.

What does We The Wild actually sell?

We The Wild is a Sydney-based plant care brand built around vermicompost, the digested output of earthworms. Its pitch is a tidy three-product system, plant food, leaf spray, and pest control, extended with a grow lamp, sticky traps, and assorted accessories. Before the criticism, here is the honest inventory.

Three things deserve genuine credit up front. We The Wild plants a tree for every order, its packaging is recyclable, and its ingredients are diverted from organic waste streams. Those are real ethical positives and this UG audit does not dispute them. The question is not whether the company is well-intentioned. The question is whether the products do what the marketing says, and whether the science the brand gestures at actually exists.

Does We The Wild have published lab reports?

Surprisingly, even with the following posted on the WTW website, no lab reports are publicly available, and a direct request to the company has not produced anything.

This matters because the company invites you to check. The benefits page carries the above heading offering to "Download our lab reports" so you can see why the brand beats the competition. There is no download. The button beneath it links to a contact form.

So this Unlikely Gardener used it. On 22 June 2026, I emailed We The Wild and asked to see the lab reports its own Benefits page offers you to download. The first reply contained no report. It asked which product I meant.

I named the Plant Care Trio and pointed to what the site actually says: that the formulas are rigorously tested by leading scientists, that the reports prove the brand beats the competition, and that there was, in fact, nowhere to download anything. The second reply conceded the point. The company agreed its page references lab reports, said it was checking with the team for any testing details "available to share", and asked me to send a screenshot of its own Benefits page so it could locate the reference.

As of this post, 4 days after my initial request, no lab report, certification, or test result has arrived.

In the past I've requested the same information, and so far, I've never received anything from those enquiries either.

Sit with that last detail. A company was asked for the lab reports it advertises as downloadable, and its own staff had to go looking, then asked the customer to screenshot the company's marketing page to help find them. The reports are not in a folder waiting to be sent. What came back was a request for more time, not a document.

One more thing, in fairness. Me, as the Unlikely Gardener will update this article the moment We The Wild provides qualitative lab testing data that backs its product claims. That door stays open. The argument here was never that the evidence is impossible. It is that the company advertises the evidence, was asked for it directly, and has not produced it.

Elsewhere the same language repeats. The brand describes itself as "scientifically tested", says it worked with "the brightest biochemists", and credits "world-leading microbiological experts". Not one of these claims is attached to a named study, a methodology, a sample size, or a single number you can check.

Myth Check: A claim that evidence exists is not evidence. "Scientifically tested" with no test, no method, and no result is a marketing phrase, not a finding.

This is the crux of the whole audit. A brand is free to make confident claims. But the moment it tells you the proof is available and then does not provide it, the burden has not been met. Everything that follows is what happens when you go looking for that proof yourself.

What is actually in the Grow Concentrate, and is it a strong fertilizer?

We The Wild Grow Concentrate is a liquid extract of vermicompost, sold as a fast-absorbing "energy shot" for explosive growth. Its own website does not publish an NPK ratio that I was able to find. Retailers carrying the product list it at roughly 3:1:4. That number is the whole story.

For context, a 3:1:4 fertilizer is extremely dilute. Common synthetic houseplant feeds run many times more concentrated per millilitre of working solution. A 3:1:4 extract used at roughly 1ml per litre of water, diluted until it looks like "weak tea" by the company's own instruction, is a light nutritional top-up. It is not an energy shot. An energy shot, by common definition, should be concentrated.

FYI: "Like an energy shot" and "diluted until it looks like weak tea" are describing two opposite things. Weak tea is the giveaway. There simply is not much in the bottle by the time it reaches the root.

This is not a flaw in the product. A gentle, dilute organic feed is a perfectly reasonable thing to sell. It is a flaw in the framing. The bottle promises performance, and the contents deliver maintenance. Understanding what your fertilizer actually provides matters more than the marketing on the box, which is why our guide to why natural fertilizers underperform indoors spends so long on the gap between the label and the root zone.

Nerd Corner: The three NPK numbers are the percentage by weight of nitrogen, phosphorus (as P2O5), and potassium (as K2O). A 3:1:4 product is 3% nitrogen. Indoor foliage plants do best at a target of around 100 to 150 ppm nitrogen in solution at 200 µmol/m²/s of light, a figure covered in my plant nutrition articles. Hitting that from a 3% source takes a meaningful dose, and the company tells you to use a few squirts in weak tea.

Do the microbes in We The Wild plant food actually help indoor plants?

This is the load-bearing claim of the entire brand, so it deserves the full treatment. The company states it plainly through its stockists: "200+ micro-organisms help plants process nutrients more efficiently", which is why, it argues, the NPK can be low and still work. That is a strong, specific, testable claim. It is also where the science quietly walks out of the room.

The myth, as repeated: living microbes in a bottle colonize your pot, build a relationship with the roots, and unlock nutrition that mineral fertilizers cannot. More worms, more microbes, more growth.

The kernel of truth: outdoors, this is largely correct. In a living garden bed, vermicompost genuinely improves plant growth, and the peer-reviewed record backs it. The catch is what was tested. Almost all of that research used fast-growing food crops, lettuce, tomato, broccoli, pak choi, grown under greenhouse, field, or commercial hydroponic light. And when researchers traced the benefit, it came mostly from soluble nutrients, trace plant hormones, and humic acids, not from the microbes surviving and setting up shop. In one controlled field study, applying the microbial tea produced no measurable yield effect at all.

Where the logic breaks: your variegated Monstera is not a field of lettuce. It lives in a peat or coir based soilless grow mix chosen for drainage and aeration, which is pretty damn close to sterile and completely inert and has almost no food web to sustain a microbial population. Plants cannot absorb organic nitrogen directly. It has to be mineralized into nitrate and ammonium by microbes, and in a near-sterile pot those microbes are sparse, short-lived, and can even tie up nitrogen for themselves before the plant gets any. Pouring 200+ strains into that environment does not build a living soil. It introduces passengers with nowhere to live.

Nerd Corner: This is the same physiology I laid out in The Worm Castings Myth and Inert vs. Organic-Rich Grow Media. Indoors, the rhizosphere holds far fewer microbes and far less diversity than outdoor soil, even when you add organic inputs. Without an ongoing food supply, introduced microbes mostly fail to establish. The bottle's strongest claim is the one least likely to be true in your home.

Why the myth persists: three reasons, and none of them are a plan parent's fault. Plant care has long feedback loops, so a product applied for months gets credit for growth that light actually drove. "Organic" and "natural" carry a halo that makes these products feel like they are effective. And the claim is socially reinforced, as well as repeated across shops, popular influencers, and group members until it sounds like settled fact. As I always say, Agreement is not evidence.

What actually works: if you want organic inputs to perform indoors, you need to supply the microbial workforce and its food on an ongoing basis, or accept that a mineral fertilizer (synthetic) delivers nitrate and ammonium the roots can use within hours rather than weeks. The full case for why is in my natural fertilizers indoors article.

Stat: Synthetic (mineralized) fertilizers deliver nitrogen a plant can absorb within hours. Organic nitrogen can take weeks to break down, and only if the right microbes are present to do it. In a largely sterile soilless mix, like most of us use, they usually aren't.

Can you really not overdose your plants with We The Wild?

The We The Wild company tells us that we cannot burn or overdose our plants, and that "the more, the better". As a general statement, that is false.

Here is the tension the marketing never breaks through. A product that genuinely cannot overdose your plant is a product with very little in it. That is consistent with a dilute 3:1:4 extract. But the same brand promises explosive growth and an "energy shot". Both claims cannot be true at once. A feed weak enough to be foolproof is, by the same measure, too weak to be transformative.

Myth Check: "The more, the better" is the single least scientific sentence on the site. More of anything in the root zone eventually becomes a problem, even gentle organic salts.

And in the conditions most houseplants live in, more feed is actively counterproductive. In low light, a plant transpires slowly, moves little water, and takes up few nutrients. Extra fertilizer does not vanish. It accumulates in the mix as salts, raising the risk of root damage to the root hairs and feeder roots that absorb everything. What starts as simple overfeeding becomes a root health problem, then a watering problem. I walk through this failure cascade in Why Plants Need a Minimum Level of Light to Grow.

The same applies to the instruction to feed "all year round", every time you water. Tropical houseplants relying on natural light slow down in winter, not because of a calendar but because indoor light intensity collapses when relying on waning natural light. Feeding a plant that has slowed growing does not store nutrients away for spring like a squirrel hiding its nuts. It builds up salts in a plant that cannot use them. My article on whether houseplants go dormant indoors explains why feeding should track growth and light, never the season, or a bottle's instructions.

Does We The Wild's Instant Sun grow lamp produce enough light?

Here is the most 'illuminating' product in the entire WTW catalog, and the reason it appears so late in this article is that everything above it has been building to this point. Light is the one variable that actually limits indoor plant growth, and the We The Wild light is the least substantiated product the brand sells.

The Instant Sun Grow Lamp is described as mimicking "full-spectrum sunlight". It is also described as "warm white", designed not to burn leaves, and powered over USB. It publishes no PPFD , no PAR value, no wattage, no spectral chart, and no PAR map. For a grow light, that is not a minor omission. It is the entire specification, missing.

Two of those details quietly tell you the output is low. A USB connection can only deliver power within the limits of a USB port, which caps a lamp like this in the low single-digit to low double-digit watts. And a light that physically cannot burn a leaf at close range is a light that is not delivering much intensity, in the same way that a fertilizer that cannot overdose is a fertilizer without much in it. Gentle is the recurring theme, and gentle is the opposite of what an under-lit plant needs.

Stat: Light intensity drops by 75 to 90% just 3 feet (about 1m) from a window. A plant that looks well-lit to your eye can be sitting at a fraction of the light it needs, because human eyes adapt to dim rooms and plants cannot.

Then the usage advice gets the physics backwards. The company recommends running the lamp 4 to 6 hours a day to "avoid overexposure". A sub-10-watt USB lamp cannot overexpose anything. And when intensity is low, the correct response is to run the light longer, not shorter. As covered in The Truth About Low Light Plants, you can offset weak intensity with a long photoperiod, 18 to 24 hours is safe below 200 µmol/m²/s. Telling buyers to use a weak lamp for only a few hours guarantees a trivial daily light total. The lamp's own built-in timer runs 16 hours on, which contradicts the brand's own 4-to-6-hour recommendation.

Pro Tip: Before buying any grow light, demand the PPFD at a stated distance. If a light is sold for plant growth and the seller will not publish its output, treat it as decorative. Brands like Sansi and Barrina publish real numbers because real numbers are the product.

Step back, and the pattern is the whole argument of this site. We The Wild built a business on the easy variables you can put in a bottle: food, microbes, and leaf shine. Light, the one variable that governs everything else, gets sold as an afterthought accessory with no specifications at all. That inversion is exactly how the plant care industry keeps selling solutions to problems your plants do not have. For the foundational case, see Light Is the Most Important Factor.

Does the Protect spray with neem actually work?

This is the product with the most genuine science potential behind it, and fairness demands saying so clearly. Neem oil's active compound, azadirachtin, has well-documented insecticidal activity. It acts as an antifeedant and an insect growth regulator, disrupting moulting and reproduction, and the oil itself smothers soft-bodied pests like aphids, mealybugs, and spider mites. That is real, and it would be the strongest ingredient in the We The Wild range if it includes azadirachtin, but nothing suggests that it does. Clarified neem oil which is what is stated to be included typically means that the neem oil has the azadirachtin removed during processing. Since Protect isn't called an insecticide, I'm guessing that no or very limited azadirachtin is available, and the use of the term "neem oil" is to convey benefits that aren't likely in the product itself.

As noted, the spray pointedly avoids calling itself a pesticide. It is sold for "dust protection", leaf shine, and protecting leaves from "environmental stressors", language that sidesteps an explicit pest-kill claim. The "instant transformation" the label promises is cosmetic. Oils make leaves shiny immediately. Pest control from neem with azadirachtin is slow, working over weeks as it disrupts feeding and reproduction. Conflating the two lets the fast, visible effect borrow credibility for the slow, invisible one, if it's even included in the Protect product at all.

Second, as already alluded to, no azadirachtin concentration is disclosed at all, and concentration is what determines whether neem actually controls a pest or just polishes a leaf. The product adds mention of "a few secret ingredients" and an "enzyme", neither of which is specified or substantiated. This just seem like muddying the waters to make things seem better than they likely are. From the label I'd imagine it's just other natural oils.

FYI: Azadirachtin degrades quickly under UV light and heat, which is why every neem product, including this one, usually tells you to apply out of direct sun. That instruction is a signal that the active ingredient might be included, but it could simply be because oil holds heat and slows rates of transpiration which can both heat stress a plant.

The honest verdict: the neem is legitimate, what type of neem is the question, the lemon myrtle smells nice, and the spray will help with minor pest pressure from contact suffocation and clean your leaves, but you are buying an undisclosed amount of a potentially active ingredient, dressed as a leaf-shine and plant wellness product, with the marketing once again running ahead of the disclosure.

Do the fungus gnat traps get rid of gnats?

Yellow sticky traps are a legitimate, widely used tool, and making them from compostable corn instead of plastic is a real improvement. Used correctly, they catch flying adult fungus gnats, whiteflies, and winged thrips. So far, so good.

The overreach is in the promise. The label says they work on "anything with wings" and will make your pest problem "disappear". Sticky traps catch adults. They do not touch the larvae, and with fungus gnats the larvae are the problem. Fungus gnat larvae live in the top layer of constantly moist grow mix, feeding on roots and decaying organic matter, and that is also where the next generation breeds. Trap every adult in the room and the larvae below carry on regardless.

The pest list is also padded. Aphids in their damaging colony stage are mostly wingless, so a trap on the pot rim catches only the occasional winged disperser, not the infestation on the stem.

Pro Tip: Treat sticky traps as a monitoring and adult-reduction tool, never the whole solution. The real fix for fungus gnats is upstream: let the top of the mix dry as much as possible between waterings so larvae struggle a bit to survive. And if your mix refuses to dry out, the cause is usually low light slowing the plant's water use, not the gnats themselves.

That last point connects the traps to everything else in this audit. A persistent gnat problem is almost always a wet-mix problem, and a wet-mix problem is almost always a lack of light problem. The trap treats the symptom while the cause sits one rung up the ladder, exactly where the WTW catalog never looks.

Is We The Wild certified organic, and does that mean it works?

Yes, the certification is real and verifiable. We The Wild holds NASAA organic certification, number 5544M, through a recognised Australian certifier. That is not in dispute, and it is more than many plant brands bother to obtain.

But here is the distinction the marketing leans on you not to make. Organic certification verifies inputs and process. It says nothing about efficacy. It confirms what is not in the bottle and how the ingredients were sourced. It does not confirm that the bottle makes your plant grow. Those are entirely different questions, and a certificate answering the first is routinely presented as if it answered the second.

Myth Check: Certified organic means the ingredients meet an organic standard. It does not mean the product is effective, potent, or right for an indoor environment. A bakery can be certified organic and still sell you a tasteless loaf of bread.

The tree planting, the recyclable packaging, and the waste-stream sourcing are genuine reasons to feel good about the purchase on ethical grounds. None of them is a reason to expect performance. Buy We The Wild because you value those things, by all means. Just do not buy it expecting the certificate to do the growing.

So should you buy We The Wild?

If you want a gentle, certified-organic, ethically packaged plant care range that will not harm your plants and may give a mild nutritional and leaf-care benefit, We The Wild will deliver that. It is pleasant, it is safe, and the company clearly cares about its environmental footprint based on its marketing. As a feel-good maintenance range, it is fine.

As the performance system the marketing describes, it does not hold up. The growth claims, I assume, rest on research done on other plants in other conditions. The microbe story, the brand's central promise, mostly fails in the sterile pots houseplants usually live in. The "can't overdose, the more the better" line contradicts the "explosive growth" line on the same label. The grow lamp, aimed at the only variable that truly limits your plant, ships with no specifications and backwards advice. And the lab reports offered as proof do not appear to exist, or at least so far, can't be produced.

None of this is your fault as a consumer. You were fed confident, attractive marketing and a certificate that looks like science, and you reasonably assumed the proof was somewhere behind it. The proof, so far, is the part that seems to be missing.

If your plant is not thriving, fertilizer and leaf shine is not the answer. The light is. Spend your money on a grow light that publishes its PPFD before you spend on anything that promises to feed your way out of an energy shortage. Get the light right, and a cheap complete fertilizer at the correct strength will outperform the entire We The Wild product offering. Get the light wrong, and nothing in any bottle, worm-made or otherwise, can fix it.

We The Wild FAQ

Sources & Further Reading

From The Unlikely Gardener Blog:

• The Worm Castings Myth
• Why Many Natural Fertilizers Underperform Indoors
• Inert vs. Organic-Rich Grow Media
• Why Plants Need a Minimum Level of Light to Grow
• The Truth About Low Light Plants
• Light Is the Most Important Factor
• Do Houseplants Go Dormant Indoors?

Research on vermicompost teas and microbial inoculants:

• Pant et al., effects of vermicompost tea on yield and chemical quality of pak choi across multiple media.
• Arancon, Edwards et al., vermicompost tea production and plant growth impacts (Ohio State / Biocycle).
• Vermicompost teas in non-circulating hydroponics, lettuce and tomato, Journal of Plant Nutrition (2019), doi:10.1080/01904167.2019.1655049.
• Microbiological community analysis of vermicompost tea and its influence on crop growth, field study reporting no yield effect (PubMed 22712623).

Neem / azadirachtin:

• Cornell University, Resource Guide for Organic Insect and Disease Management, on neem oil and azadirachtin as antifeedant and insect growth regulator. PFD Download