Rich with worm castings, that is. As far as any garden, lawn or house plant is concerned, they're worth their weight in gold. So what could any beloved green thumb crave more than a tub of red wrigglers under the kitchen sink?
If it sounds unsavoury, please bear with me. It's a sweeter and cleaner undertaking than it sounds. And if you've ever bought a carton of worm castings to keep your green friends happy, or seen how annelids turn vegetable waste into fertilizer, you'll know the worth of a steady supply.
Even through the winter. That's one of the great benefits of vermicomposting, but it doesn't stop there.
If you're a home naturalist like me, you caught onto the benefits of a compost pile long ago. I learned the technique from reading Ranger Rick when I was about 10. Mom gave a small patch of garden for vegetables and I dug a compost pit on the far side of the vacant lot beside our house. Our family loved nature, but wasn't aware enough to apply organic principles properly. My hole in the ground produced little, though to my delight it attracted a few garter snakes for hibernation.
Not until many years later, with an intensive vegetable garden eight metres (25 feet) square, did I have the chance to see organic mulch and a compost pile work magic.
I was determined to breathe life into the dry, stony soil which had newly become my own. And I was determined to accomplish it using methods that were environmentally sound. But the earth was so hard to work and so infertile that I nearly gave up. For two years my starved vegetables succumbed to disease, insects and vagaries of weather.
But during the third summer my strategy of heavy mulching and deep digging finally paid off. I grew sweet corn for the first time; it shot tall and fertile in Ontario's July heat. My tomatoes and potatoes grew so vigorously that they staved off plagues of beetles and fungus with little assistance from me, and I harvested a bumper crop.
Composting had won my allegiance, and had brought my heart close to the soil forever.
Now that the strange path of life has brought me to live in an apartment, I find myself hungry for the feel of dirt under my nails. Last November I asked my landlord for the use of a little strip of mangy grass along the sidewalk, dug it up and enriched it with some bone meal and bagged sheep manure. This spring I planted alpine and meadow flowers in the sun-bleached, gravelly soil, and they flourished.
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