Features: The Gardening Coach • Susan Harris

COMMUNITY WILDLIFE HABITAT UPDATE The next planning meeting is July 20 at 7:30 and all are welcome. Call Linda Keenan at 301/434-9671 for details. And watch for our table at Takoma's Sunday market.

Earthworms — The ultimate recyclers

Okay all you committed recyclers out there with your compost bins and meticulously separated papers and plastics; are you ready to take the next step? Well, with very little investment you can put earthworms to work turning kitchen scraps into nature's best fertilizer for your garden.

It's called vermicomposting and all it takes is an aerated container, some shredded newspaper, red worms (Eisenia foetida) and your garbage. Just store the container, either homemade or purchased, where it's maintained between 40 and 80 degrees and protected from the rain - say, in a laundry room, basement or under the kitchen sink. Popular bin brands are Can-O-Worms, Wriggly Wranch, and The Worm Factory, all available on the web. A new 3-tray bin is yours for about $65 and 1,000 worms will cost another $28. Locally, Purple Mountain Organics at 7010 Westmoreland Avenue sells plastic Worm Factory bins or will build a wooden bin for you. The bin will come with instructions, including a long list of worms' favorite foods. Curiously, one website I visited warns its customers not to feed them plastic, rubber or aluminum foil, just in case we mistake those for actual foodstuffs.

Though earthworms were revered as early as Cleopatra's time- she decreed them protected subjects and sacred animals-in our part of the world they were killed during the last Ice Age, leaving very little of the land that is now the U.S. to be suitable for farming. The few worms that survived are poor soil-builders and driven off by disturbance of any kind, so organic American farmers are indebted to European earthworms for making our soil fertile enough to feed us.

All that fertility is thanks to the worms' castings (excrement, but don't let it bother you), which are compost of the highest grade. Not just nutrient-rich, they also aerate the soil, suppress pests and plant diseases, promote beneficial soil bacteria and correct water problems like run-off and poor drainage. No wonder studies have found up to 20 times greater yields after earthworms are introduced to farmland. To increase the earthworm population in your garden, just give them something to eat by spreading Takoma's free leaf mulch everywhere. The worms will love it and reward you by reproducing like the hedonists they are.

For all their virtues, it turns out that in the wrong place-deciduous forests-earthworms do too good a job of eating the leaf litter and have caused the loss of up to 90 percent of understory plants in some areas. Though live bait has been banned in some wilderness areas, our suburban Maryland soils have been found to contain over 1 million earthworms per acre, so they're here and here to stay.

After long dismissing earthworms as organic and therefore unscientific, researchers have finally documented their value in farming and gardening, and vermicomposting is catching on, even for homeowners. Progressive cities like Seattle are distributing bins free or at cost to their residents. And early findings for earthworms' other benefits are impressive. They turn the smelly "biosolids" of city sewage into inoffensive fertilizer and soil enhancer. They neutralize the effects of nuclear waste in soil. And they offer a solution to the huge pollution problem caused by animal waste on farms (500 million tons produced per year in the U.S.), turning manure into organic fertilizer that can safely be applied directly to farmland.

Thus Amy Stewart, author of The Earth Moved , asks, "Is it too idealistic to imagine that worms could take care of all kinds of agricultural, industrial and municipal waste and turn it into fertilizer that farms could use in place of chemicals?" Sounds inevitable to me, and I can't wait to start feeding my banana peels to some hungry red worms.

Master Gardener Susan Harris writes about gardening for UDC's Cooperative Extension Service and teaches gardening privately; see - thegardeningcoach.com. She also blogs at gardenrant.com and takomagardener.typepad.com.

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