Sustainable Gardening For Dummies by Donna Ellis

Author:Donna Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

The excretion (poo, castings, vermicasts or whatever you like to call it) at the end of it all is rich and full of bacteria from the worm’s innards. It also contains a mix of soil and subsoil from the earthworm tunnelling near the surface and deeper down in the earth. This is the magic potion that transforms your soil from dirt to a fertile and living body.

Earthworms give your soil a beautiful crumbly structure, and it will be well aerated from all of the tunnelling and burrowing going on. Aeration allows for greater water penetration and moisture-holding capacity of your soil. Your plants are invigorated and thrive because the roots find it much easier to penetrate the soil to find an abundant source of moisture and readily available nutrients, all thanks to the microorganism-rich worm castings. If the soil in your sustainable garden happens to be acidic (where the pH is under about 7 — refer to Chapter 2), worm castings assist with raising the pH to a more neutral reading. Worms actually excrete calcium carbonate (lime), and these secretions assist in raising the pH of a soil. Pretty clever little critters.

What Worm Is That?

While the anatomy of different varieties of worm is much the same, worldwide there are more than 6,000 species! Just as Australia and New Zealand have unique native plants and animals, so too they have unique native worms.

New Zealand has at least 171 species of native earthworms and 23 non-native species. Australian natives are thought to total around 1,000. In Australia, the ‘Gippsland Giant’ (Megascolides australis) has been recorded at 4 metres in length, with the average length being 2 to 3 metres, and a diameter of 2 centimetres. A small child could get lost in the tunnel of that worm! Another species from New South Wales, Notoscolex grandis, has been recorded at 150 centimetres long, with the thickness of a garden hose.

The common garden earthworm, however, is actually an introduced species, brought to Australia and New Zealand by Europeans over the last couple of centuries. They were in soil containing exotic plant species that settlers wanted to cultivate in their new and strange land, to make their new environment seem more like ‘home’. This particular type of worm, indigenous to Europe, is reddish grey in colour and usually about 6 or 7 centimetres in length. Like most worms, they come to the surface at night when it’s dark and cool.

With the cover of darkness they are safe, with no hungry pesky birds around to eat them. While on or around the surface during the night, they munch on the lovely leaf litter and leave their rich castings behind to enrich your sustainable garden. They also mate on the surface. During the day they burrow and tunnel under the ground, keeping well away from predators.

The earthworms you encounter in your garden soil are very different from the types of worm that are used in worm farms, and I deal with these types of critters in the section ‘Types of worms for worm farms’ later in this chapter.

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