Garden Time

I'm reading a book about earthworms, and it's full of interesting information and entertaining anecdotes. I've been changing over my front lawn into veggie garden space, so it's a timely topic. New seed catalogs have arrived, and I'm planning now for the meals to come. (Breakfast today was roasted butternut squash and cornbread. Yea, I eat what I grow!)

I'm a fan of doing things the easy way if they work, so to change it over, I layered big sheets of cardboard over the lawn, then chunks of old hay bales, then horse manure and dozens of large bags of used coffee grounds from Starbucks. Not all at once, but over a period of many months. Most of it was free, and some was delivered for me. So it was not as much work as it sounds, and besides, it's good exercise.

Every now and then a neighbor will stop by and ask if I'm going to rototill it all in in the spring, and I say no, just going to plant in it, some of it veggies, some a cover crop to build up the soil.

In that earthworm book they mention how a lot of worms need a layer of decomposing leaves/plant material on top of the soil, so mine should be full of worms by next summer. Using a rototiller will kill most of the worms, and even 'double digging' can disturb them enough to interfere with their productivity.

(One other book I like is Ruth Stout's The No Work Garden Book. She's an advocate of very thick mulches and no digging.)

The two aspects of gardening that it helps to remember, is that 1: the health of the soil is everything, and 2: there's a delayed effect of sometimes a whole year. When I put something in/on the ground, it takes awhile for it to get into the system of the soil and then the plant, and show results. As the nutrients increase, the earthworms will reproduce and help the soil in many ways (aeration, fertility, etc.) It may take many years for it all to get into its prime.

Most of the plant lives underground. What you see is a small part of the whole plant, those roots spread far further and wider than the branches on top. And what you see, how green the leaves are, how many fruit and the nutritional content of it all, is a result of what's going on in the earth. Earthworms and all kinds of microbes, fungi, bacteria, and other teeny critters all contribute to the health of the plant, and secondly the health of those who eat the plant.

So in this book, they mention how "conventional" farming using petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides is not truly "conventional", it started relatively recently, in the post WWII era as a result of industry needing another use for their products, namely explosives (=fertilizers, think Oklahoma Federal Bldg. explosion) and nerve agents (=pesticides, very effective killers of living nerves of all kinds.) Marketing sure is effective, isn't it?...

Anyway, I haven't needed to add any worms out there, as there already were some under the lawn, but now they've already been working their way up through the now rotted cardboard, and are frolicking in the old manure and rotting straw, having a grand old time.

And so am I! (okay, I'm easily amused...)