Black Gold

My husband took on a big task today: emptying out the compost bin. The reason for this was...I'm not sure. I think it was because the bottom was getting compacted with so many worm castings, and he wanted to take out some of the castings for our raised bed, since we are about to plant some winter crops. Sure enough, the bottom was packed with rich, dark castings--black gold! We sifted out 6-7 bucketfuls and piled it in our raised bed. Turning out all that compost was a lot of work (he did most of it). I sifted and spread the compost around the bed, and took pictures, like of the gobs of worms, below.
The worm population is very healthy and vigorous. I shredded newspaper and we layered that in the bottom of the compost bin and put all the still-decaying matter back in. The worms should like that.
I pulled out some old plants from the bed and found these worm-like things at the base of some of my declining bean plants. They are only about 1/2" long. I wonder if they could be millipedes? They look like the larvae of something.

Inadvertent Worm Farmer

(Come to think of it, worm farmer isn't really right. It implies some kind of commercial enterprise. Like the politically correct dog owners these days, I will call myself a worm guardian.)
I never really wanted a worm bin--too much responsibility, like having hundreds of pets. But our compost bin has over the past few months turned into a worm bin, and now I go and check on the little creatures every day. My invitations to my sons ("Wanna come and see some worms?") have so far met with polite declines. But my husband is my partner in worm husbandry. In fact, it is he who is responsible for our compost becoming the home of several hundred (or more?) red worms, since he confessed to occasionally tossing worms in there from the garden. I guess at least two of them* were the right kind, because there has been a population explosion and our bin is writhing with them.
They don't exactly need a lot of "care." They need fresh compost to eat, which we were doing already by feeding the compost bin our vegetable scraps and trimmings from our garden. They need moisture, which we added when the compost seemed a bit dry. We have taken to adding ripped up strips of newspaper since the worms like it--in fact, this morning I caught my husband outside with our office shredder, shredding paper for the worms. And that's about it.
I became curious the other day because I noticed that sometimes they seem to collect on the sides of the bin and even the underside of the lid, so when I pulled it off there was a mass of them. I searched through a few sites about worms, but all I could find was a description of something called "worm crawl" when all the worms decide to leave their bin together in a mass exodus. This was not happening--thank god! Sounds scary. The only thing to do was to email my farmer friend Karen, who lives on a real farm and who several years ago originally urged me to get a worm bin and showed me hers. At that time I was not hip to worms and politely declined.
Karen responded that her worms sometimes climb up to the top of the pile or the sides if it's too warm for them, or too moist. I was reassured to read this: "My worms regularly come up in a huge, roiling mass --and they often climb on the lid to my container." So, nothing to worry about.
The hardest part is separating the worms from the compost when I'm ready to use it. Specially-designed worm bins have separate sections for adding new compost so you can let all the worms migrate to the new compost before harvesting the castings. But everything gets pretty much mixed up in our bin. When we harvest our compost, we have to sift and separate out all the undecomposed stuff anyway, so I have been trying to pick out the worms and put them back in the bin. But quite a few go along with the compost back into the garden. Sounds like I'm doing pretty much what Karen does: "To remove more worms from the castings, I have tried piling up the castings in the sun to encourage the worms to move to the bottom, away from the light. It was more effort than necessary, so now I don't worry if some worms get placed into the garden."
My nieces are coming over for dinner tonight. I think I'll take them out back and show 'em my worms.

*Yes, there must be two of them, because even though worms are hermaphroditic, there must be two of them so they can rub their clitellums against segments 9-11 of their mating partner, depositing sperm in each other's bodies. For a more in-depth discussion, see the excellent description on the Backyard Nature site.

Things that Bring Me Joy

In the last few days I have been concentrating on things that give me joy. Maybe you could even say, things that make me glad I'm alive (see previous post).
Here are some recent ones:
-Scones
-Notes that say "I love you" from my son
-Snuggling with my husband
-Western Tiger Swallowtail butterflies on top of Mt. Davidson
-Seeing my son win both the 1600 and 800 races--easily--at a track meet
-The wondrous birdhouse/treehouse constructions of Patrick Dougherty woven out of willow trimmings on top of the trees at SF Civic Center Plaza across from City Hall
-Red worms in my compost

Changing the Earth

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.” –from "Hamlet," William Shakespeare
Is it any wonder that we feel squeamish about worms? Amy Stewart uses this quote in her book "The Earth Moved" to illustrate our association of earthworms with death and decay, but also the transformative power of earthworms. Through the action of earthworms, "...a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar," as Hamlet says. Earthworms are great levelers; we all become food for them no matter who we are.

I like to think of Stewart's book as reconditioning our thoughts about earthworms--like my uttering "Nice worm!" when I see a particularly long one in my garden. Here's another passage by Stewart that I like; it makes me imagine that writing a blog is a little like the action of earthworms:
"Worms are ruminators; they sift through whatever surrounds them, turn it over, explore it, move through it. They are deliberate creatures, in no great hurry, but always in motion, twisting and burrowing, shrinking and contracting, and eating. They spend their lives in a kind of active mediation, working through the detritus in which they live, the bits of leaves and grass and particles of soil. For a being with such a simple brain, a worm seems, in this way, almost thoughtful."

If earthworms can change the earth through consuming what's around them, maybe all the thousands (millions) of blogs digesting our world can do the same. Each blog is like one earthworm's casting (I guess that would make me an earthworm). And blogs are levelers, too; it doesn't take much to create one. Taken all together the blogs enrich and nourish our intellectual life and create a fertile ground in which people can connect and ideas can flourish. Have I beaten this metaphor into the ground?

Earthworm Revelations

"It is both fascinating and a little disturbing to pull something out of the ground and stare at it, something that does not belong up here with the rest of us." --Amy Stewart, "The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms"

I found out a lot about the earthworms in my garden after reading Amy Stewart's book. For one thing, my worms were not bathing in the moonlight when I observed them half out of the ground. They were most likely foraging and dragging organic materials into their burrows. That's assuming the worms I saw in my garden at night were the same earthworms Charles Darwin studied, Lumbricus terrestris (nightcrawler), which do leave their burrows at night (other worms don't seem to feel the desire to wander about on the surface).

One thing Darwin discovered in his study of worms was that earthworms have enough intelligence to determine which end of a dead leaf will fit most easily into its burrow. Before him, no one had really observed the activities of earthworms. But Darwin did more than observe: he conducted experiments with little triangles of paper to see which end--the narrow end or the wide end--the earthworms would grab. Out of 303 little paper trianges, according to Stewart, the earthworms grabbed the narrower end 62 percent of the time. Darwin concluded: "We may therefore infer--improbable as is the inference--that worms are able by some means to judge which is the best end by which to draw triangles of paper into their burrows." Oh, and although they are sensitive to light, earthworms are blind. So how do they do that?

I have seen a few really large nightcrawlers--like 8-10 inches--in our garden before, but the ones I have seen most recently are shorter. Those long ones make me shudder, only right afterward I say "Nice worm!" to recondition myself. I know worms are good for the soil, at least soil that I want to grow things in, but those really long ones are, well, disturbing. When I'm digging to plant things, I see other worms: smaller, thinner, pinkish or even grayish. They could be Lumbricus rubellus (redworm) or Aporrectodea turgida or Aporrectodea tuberculata or Allolobophora caliginosa (gray worm or field worm), names almost as long as the worms themselves. These are all common garden worms, non-native to the U.S. and spread by European settlers. There are a few native California worms but they do not live where the soil has been disturbed by humans, unlike the non-native species.

I would like to know just what is on the end of my trowel, but it's surprisingly hard to find out. So far I can't find anything online that lists which worm species are common to San Francisco, or even the Bay Area, specifically. There is Worm Watch, a Canadian site with a detailed field guide for identifying one's own worms (and reporting one's findings to the Canadian government in the interest of monitoring the distribution of worm species), so if we have some of the same species, I suppose I could try identifying them myself. I called the SF Garden for the Environment, and the staff person knew what species of worms were in the worm composting bins, but not the ones living in the soil. She said if I find out, please call her back to let her know.

The photo is from kidcyber.com.au, species not identified.