Mother's Worms

I’m finally learning about rural land use and crop farming.  There are those in my family who will say I’ve had a green thumb since we moved to California in 1948.  I do have and show the genetic disposition towards that end, which I inherited from my mother, a fertile-land advocate from her birth a century ago.  But the truth is that I have painstakingly developed “my green thumb”, and only recently, during my past twenty years of retirement in Sonoma County. 

I enrolled in a sustainable land management programme at Sonoma State.  I’ve done trial and error at my place and at the Guerneville Community Church.  I learned about composting and tried it at the Church.  My daughter’s influence recently prompted me to try worm composting again.  Now I am a convert.

My mother, loved worms, lusted after worms, and despaired the last thirty years of her life in Carmel, that she couldn’t have them in her garden.  She had become of an age, when the size of her Carmel garden was too great for her to take care of herself.  Her professional gardener, as many do, used only sterile compost (no worms), and brought in yards of it every year to feed the annuals and perennials.  And at the end of each season, massive pruning, cutting, and carting away took place, of the prior year’s detritus.  So, the soil remained sterile.  There was no food for worms.

In those years, I attempted to bring up buckets of dirt from my gardens, laden with worms.  They didn’t last – no food.  I was doing the right things back in my gardens, but I didn’t understand it and it didn’t work at mother’s house.

The penny dropped this past year.  I tried it with my SSU sustainable idea – four wood pallets [freely available], linked together by bungee cord, providing a 3ft X 3ft X 3ft bin {1 cubic yard}.  I quickly ran out of room in the first bin, and went to a second, then third, and finally fourth bin, before the weather turned and I got on the using cycle.  It’s mid-August and I’ve harvested two bins of their perfect, rich, wormy compost to start spreading around the yard to both feed this year’s plants and also provide water retention benefits.

Now, having experienced this complete cycle, I realize that I have achieved stasis: four yards out in the fall – four yards in during the spring.  Except, I’m adding in plant starts, and their accompanying starter soil; and I’m adding in all the tops, cuttings, and peelings from my mostly vegetarian diet.  I also add in daily coffee grounds, a bit of newsprint, etc.

This cycle could go on and on until California drops under the ocean floor, and then comes back up again 300 million years from now, and the worms [who may then dominate the world] harvest the oil from the compressed plant material in my garden.