De mysteriis vermibus

[fivemack]

After 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]

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

This is what the Soil Association have been banging on about for 60 years - if you don't look after the soil, its ecology will collapse. Your earthworms, if not all killed by bad soil management, will be in dark and damp places - which should include, in the soil...

Do be aware that earthworms are a different species from the various kinds of composting worms, however!

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

My experience has been that earth that when turned over with a garden fork turns out to be heaving with worms, won't have shown any obvious signs of them when one looked at the surface beforehand; so things may well not be as doom-ridden as you think.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Don't you mean vermium?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

If you get earthworms, what you first want to do (lest you feed the thrushes) is break up a couple of inches of the topsoil, which will allow them to burrow.

And, while worms (and it is earthworms) to convert leaves to soil, they need a layer of them, so they can squirm around and eat the leaves.

I think the rate of deposition is about 1/4 inch per year.

TK

gardening

[(Anonymous)]

Dr. Womack!!!
I found myself doing quite a lot of gardening recently. Apparently my house could be called Stonehenge. I've got piles of stones and bricks in my garden along with fatty massive worms... plus two frogs constantly copulating... must be my inspiring musk fragrance... Well, since I cannot count on Dan's gardening skills but only on his attitudes as gardening director and the enthusiastic and energetic gardener Dr. Chris is frogging somewhere else, I believe you are the outstanding candidate to come around and "work in the field". I definitely endorse your application. Chocolate cakes and chocolate pasta and chocolate risotto and chocolate of course will be included in your contract! Deadline for work completion: September 2008… no rush of course…

Tom, any suggestion about how to reorganize completely my garden… of course, with a minimum effort and nonchalance?!!!

Un abbraccio,
Chiara

P.S.
Gosh, how hard is it doing gardening? Better being a frog!