Beside the Stream

Peg raises worms, and she has for fifteen years.  Red wiggler worms.  You could call her a vermiculturist, because she grows them and sells them in little Chinese food take-out cartons.  She makes about $250 a year from worms, which makes her one of the few alchemists you’re likely to meet.  She turns garbage into gold.

 There’s nothing particularly complicated about her system. 

The square enclosed by wire is this year’s active pile, and the open square is last year’s pile, composted and full of worms.  The worm pile is enclosed to keep her dogs out, and inside the wire enclosure she layers coffee grounds from the local latte shop and old lettuce leaves from the grocery dumpster (but any kitchen compost will do).  She adds a scoop of worms and covers the new pile with leaves or old manure.  As the season progresses she adds more pockets of organic matter when she’s in the mood, covering each additional contribution with a layer of leaves or manure.  And she lets nature do the rest of the work. 

There is still snow in Peg’s yard, but she already has broken open last year’s pile and the worms are looking good.

I mean, they’re looking good if you like a lot of worms.  These red wigglers are not native to North America, but they are not invasive.  If you put them into your garden, they’ll die.

Lots of sources say that there aren’t any native worms in North America, but it’s not true: in the south and the west there were plenty of worms to start with, but there weren’t any native earthworms in the northeast after the last glacier receded.  And the non-native worms have changed the northeastern forests. 

According to 2003 research, when earthworms move into a new area, they feed on the organic material on the forest floor and bring it down into their burrows. They feed primarily on the top layer of leaf litter, as well as on the duff – the spongy layer of decomposing vegetation beneath the leaf litter. …Earthworms do an excellent job of recycling nutrients, but “when they eat away the duff layer, all the plant seeds that germinate there, like trillium and mayflowers and wood anemone, may disappear or may not have any place to germinate. Other creatures that live in the duff and forest litter like salamanders and ground-nesting birds may be affected as well. Within a decade or two, the worms can essentially change the soil profile into something like the black mineral-rich soils that are found in many European forests.”

Non-native nightcrawlers are making the duff disappear.

These little red wigglers don’t survive in the forests, but I don’t think they’re very attractive. 

For beauty in an earthworm,  we have our native giant palouse earthworm, Driloleirus americanus,  a pinkish-white earthworm that can reach 3 feet long and is said to smell like lilies when handled.   Even though this one is a little battered, you can see it’s a beautiful creature.

Red wigglers, Eisenia foetida, are sold in Chinese take-out boxes while the giant palouse earthworm is an endangered species. 

As the alchemists of an earlier age would say,

Sic transit gloria mundi - (Thus passes the glory of the world).