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De mysteriis vermibus
Mar. 19th, 2006 01:25 pmAfter a remarkably purposeless Saturday, I spent the morning gardening; initially raking the lawn, then going over and over it to remove fallen leaves by hand. The flowerbeds were also thickly covered with fallen leaves, and the surface of the soil seems pretty compacted.
I couldn't help thinking that biology lessons at school suggested that fallen leaves ought swiftly to be devoured by worms; at which point I noticed that I'd been closely examining the garden for an hour and had seen only one worm.
Many Internet sites will sell me worms: is simply adding a pound of worms uniformly distributed across the garden likely to help, or would it merely cause a brief plague of ecstatic thrushes? Having convinced my parents to put kitchen waste in the green bin provided by the council, I'm wondering whether a wormery mightn't be a sensible way to go ... excess of compost is the kind of problem a gardener loves to have.
Or is it simply that a cold March is not a time suitable for worms, and they're far underground ready to re-emerge in May and clear the beds of leaves overnight?
Today I also discovered that the stems of ivy go a lovely shade of pink with delicate palest-yellow buds when they're growing in the dark behind weatherboarding; reminiscent of what I've read about forced rhubarb.
[Edit: looking at wigglywigglers.co.uk suggests that there's something uniquely uncompostable about walnut leaves, which could be a problem since the garden's overhung by a large walnut tree. In some sense that's the root of all our garden troubles; the walnuts attract the squirrels, which have dug up and devoured the bulbs we put in last autumn]
I couldn't help thinking that biology lessons at school suggested that fallen leaves ought swiftly to be devoured by worms; at which point I noticed that I'd been closely examining the garden for an hour and had seen only one worm.
Many Internet sites will sell me worms: is simply adding a pound of worms uniformly distributed across the garden likely to help, or would it merely cause a brief plague of ecstatic thrushes? Having convinced my parents to put kitchen waste in the green bin provided by the council, I'm wondering whether a wormery mightn't be a sensible way to go ... excess of compost is the kind of problem a gardener loves to have.
Or is it simply that a cold March is not a time suitable for worms, and they're far underground ready to re-emerge in May and clear the beds of leaves overnight?
Today I also discovered that the stems of ivy go a lovely shade of pink with delicate palest-yellow buds when they're growing in the dark behind weatherboarding; reminiscent of what I've read about forced rhubarb.
[Edit: looking at wigglywigglers.co.uk suggests that there's something uniquely uncompostable about walnut leaves, which could be a problem since the garden's overhung by a large walnut tree. In some sense that's the root of all our garden troubles; the walnuts attract the squirrels, which have dug up and devoured the bulbs we put in last autumn]
