Earthworms are enthusiastic about my new lasagne garden.
I’m not growing lasagne. That’s the term for layering paper or cardboard over an area you want to reclaim and topping it off with compost materials. Come spring, you can plant directly into the casserole.
There’s nothing there now but a fat sludge of dark compost over the original weedy patch and cardboard, both of which are gone, and if you turn it over with a shovel, it looks like a blond brownie. Evidently the cardboard component attracted earthworms, and from the looks of it, the whole setup agreed with them. I certainly won’t argue with them and I don’t think the robins will either without a whole team on the tug-o-war. Some of the worms that have lurched out when I took a hoe to this began audibly galloping off quicker than I could find my camera, pointy-end first, with small shrubberies quaking several feet away. One of these suckers would set a heron back.
Cool! I thought. Everyone knows earthworms are good for the soil. I remember them from my youth. They lived in Daddy’s compost pile. No one on the block had a compost pile but my Daddy, and that plus the fact he voted for Adlai Stevenson set him apart. He’d send me to the compost pile to find an earthworm if we were going fishing.
If I fished with one of the ones I’ve been digging up here, I could finally snag a steelhead. Or possibly a tuna, or the Queen Mary. These ain’t bluegill worms.
So everyone knows earthworms aerate the soil and move nutrients around, which is a fancy way of saying they eat here and poop elsewhere. But it turns out that they’re not necessarily so benign. In fact, they’re damn near ruining forests wherever they find a way in. Which apparently they are doing because people toss their extra bait worms into the ditch. I’ve done it too. Didn’t know not to. Once they’re in, they’re immune to eviction.
And not a one of them is native. Our native earthworms got iced out with the glaciers. These are European imports, and as long as they confine themselves to our vegetable beds, they’re all right. But in our splendid deciduous forests, where a rich layer of detritus rules, or is supposed to, they can snack it all gone. Forests with earthworm populations quickly lose their plant wealth and become barren. And that is very encouraging for garlic mustard.
You might have heard of garlic mustard. This is another invasive, a plant, and knowledgeable people yank it up wherever they see it in the forest. This gives them that double glow of fighting the good fight and also demonstrating their knowledgeableness to their companions. Weirdly, though, although they are correct that mustard garlic is a bane of the forest, they might be perpetuating it by pulling it. It’s okay if it’s just a few pioneer plants, but it turns out that if there’s a big infestation of the stuff, it limits itself and dwindles after a while. It actually does better if it’s “managed” by removal. And there’s a huge correlation between garlic mustard invasions and (1) the presence of earthworms, and (2) the apparently related presence of deer. So says Dr. Berndt Blossey, conservation biologist, who has studied this. Keep the deer out and you lose the earthworms and the garlic mustard. Word is, you pretty much lose Lyme disease, too.
And, I feel compelled to add, you help out the salamanders, which are God’s favorite species, no matter what else you may have heard.
I’m not sure they’ve quite figured out how an overpopulation of deer leads to a surfeit of earthworms, but Dr. Blossey has a hundred bucks that says it’s so. There are way, way, way, way more deer than there used to be, all of them itchy. And way fewer big cats and wolves and the like. We should be hauling in more predators but people are right fussy about that.
So experts now recommend severe culling of deer, limiting them to five to seven per square mile. I can’t do it, personally. But y’all go ahead on. I’ll eat it.
Sorry from Europe re the whole earthworms and garlic mustard shitshow. If it softens the blow (it won’t), we’re losing our earthworms to invasive flatworms from New Zealand. In the UK, garlic mustard is known as Jack-by-the hedge, and isn’t particularly rampant, possibly due to Orange Tip butterflies or, more likely, humans ripping out the hedges. I’m with you as regards the deer, less in the habitat, more on the plate, please.
We actually BUY worms from a local park (they have a vending machine with worms for fishing in the nearby pond.) There are 2 different varieties, and each is good for separate things. One is good for putting in the compost, another for one’s vegetable garden. (Red Wigglers for the compost pile, Night Crawlers for the garden.) They reproduce phenomenally, and our outdoor birds appreciate them, too.
I used to go on nature hikes in an herbal medicine class that was led by a Cherokee medicine man. This was back in the 80s. Garlic mustard, before it flowers, is great in salads. Has, as you’d expect, a garlicky taste. So, as long as it hasn’t been sprayed, or isn’t by the side of the road. You can even sauté it with other greens.
We used to know a deer hunter who would GIVE us venison. OMG! Amazing stuff! I miss him.
Wouldn’t you think that if you had a worm on an island it would more or less stay put? Alas, we spread things everywhere. Maybe the NZ flatworm is getting us back for bringing all those rats and dogs and cats over and massacring their wildlife.
If you want to, look at this video of “jumping” earthworms. GACK!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrGnUFDXuyQ
I didn’t want to exactly, but Ew. Ew. Ew.
I hear that the jumping earthworm makes the soil worse, not better.
There are (for now) 20 acres of woods behind my house. Loaded with deer. Our local annual survey suggests we have close to 60 deer per square mile. But now the developers have put in a logging road, so we’ll be taking care of the whole worms/garlic mustard/deer problem.
That’s too many deer, but not enough acres of undisturbed woods. I’m sorry for you.
Well, if there are too many deer, why not have hunters “harvest” them? Someone could buy the meat, butcher it, and sell it. I would certainly buy it. It’s delicious! And we’re preventing an invasive species from taking over! It certainly beats the fucking hell out of trying to rip out english ivy! I was out there the other day, ripping, and cursing… and none of it was grammatically or anatomically correct.
When they cull, they donate the meat to local food pantries. I’d be nervous about hunters in the woods, tho. The whole 20 acres is surrounded by schools and homes.
Salamanders are God’s favorite species!!
Theologians would say we is!
Just shows how little they know.
I’ve been involved with culling Canada geese, another unintentionally invasive species at least here in NJ where a nonnative, non migratory species was introduced to replace the local species that had been hunted to near extinction. We didn’t have geese all year long when I was a kid, just fall and spring and now they never leave.
We’ve tried egg oddling and rounding up the adults and gassing them, but that wasn’t popular, so it stopped. Hunters might help thin them out, but there aren’t as many hunters as there used to be and the bag limit is too low to reduce the population.
There are similar problems with bringing down the deer population. Not enough predators and people lobbying against culling efforts.
Our native Oregon (west, or damp side of the state) earthworm was 20 inches long. Everybody got excited a few yrs ago when maybe a rare remnant straggler was found in a road excavation cut into pieces,,,,,,,, they disappeared with the virgin forests……..
All I know about earthworms is my garden used to be tough old bush style grasses with hard packed soil and no worms and now I have other plants, composting leaves breaking down and more than a few earthworms. But probably not enough of them.
I certainly hope that nobody imports from NZ the rare North Auckland worm or, from Australia, the endangered Giant Gippsland worm. The former can grow to 5 feet long, and the latter, to 6. I’m not sure that I want to know what they eat.
In a chunk of central Maine (Skowhegan to Fairfield) venison is contaminated by high levels of “forever chemicals” (PFAS) resulting from years of farmers being encouraged to fertilize their pastures with municipal sludge, which also contaminated milk and vegetables and left those farmers without a marketable product and with severely debased property values.