Garden journal: smug about earthworms
I’m feeling very smug about the earthworms in my garden.
I’m not feeling smug about much else in the garden, but those worms are something I’ll write home to mother about. (Mother? Are you reading?)
When we moved last year, we inherited a garden that was deceptively pretty. Standard roses and climbing roses out the front that, when we arrived here in spring, were blooming with abandon. Vines along the fence at the back, manicured into arches over camellias, interspersed with something tall, lovely and blooming - probably crabapple. Tiny box hedges trimmed the little pathways, and formed a circle in the middle of the tiny back yard around an ornamental bird-bath, with Japanese maples and more roses in the corners.
Doesn’t it sound lovely? It is! The photographs in this post were taken in spring last year, when the garden was in full bloom. The view from the kitchen table looked as though I was sitting in a country garden, despite living in the city.
Unfortunately, my new garden has two problems.
The first is that it was designed to be looked at from inside the house, not to be enjoyed while outdoors. The little box hedges, for example, make it impossible to stroll through the garden, or sit in it - definitely not play in it or dine in it. Even the manicured arches of vines on the fence were planted to match up with the arches in our kitchen windows, so you can gaze out of said kitchen with symmetry. Aside from the plants I’ve already mentioned, there are loads of scrappy, spindly bushes all over the place, popping up without any evident purpose, and telling any humans who venture nearby, “Go back.”
The second problem is the soil. Our summer this year was particularly long and brutal - probably the worst I can remember having - and the leaves of the Japanese maples and all the roses began burning off quite early. The other plants began following suit not long after: each day in the evening, I could crumble their dry leaves in my hands, leaving behind bare twigs and branches. I took to covering sections of my garden with bed-sheets every morning, but to little avail. I watered my garden diligently, but the water just wasn’t soaking into the soil.
At first, I blamed the heat. It really was a horrible, hot summer. But not all the plants in the neighbourhood were burning away. What was I doing wrong?
Picture me in a deerstalker hat, clutching a magnifying glass. The Case of the Dying Garden. I decided to investigate, and started with the soil.
I dug into it early one morning, an hour after watering, and the soil was as dry as powder. Horrible, lifeless, brown powder. So then I tried elsewhere, moving aside the thick layer of black-dyed mulch the previous owner had laid down, and turning over the soil in different places. Everywhere was dry, rocky, and not a living thing to be seen. That was when I first realised there were no earthworms, too. Meanwhile on top, more plants were dying every day.
(Did you catch the Clue #1 in the paragraph above? If my mother is reading this right now, she has probably already cracked the case. But there’s more.)
One of our neighbours walked past. “I don’t understand it,” she said, “the former owners were always in this garden. I’m amazed there’s anything left to do!” Queue my guilt rising even further: it was me! I was killing their baby!
Then another neighbour walked past. “They went heavy on the fertiliser,” he said, and winked.
My mother is probably shouting at the screen by now, because that’s Clue #2.
I cracked the case! Here is where my detective work took me, in the end.
Clue #1: The Black Mulch. Our garden was completely and thickly covered in black mulch, presumably to make it look neat and tidy while the house was up for sale. But I learned in my research that dyed mulch can kill the good soil-bacteria, insects, earthworms, and sometimes even the plants. It can also cause contaminants like trace minerals to soak into the soil (this depends on where the original wood chips came from, and what kinds of dyes were used, something I can’t know).
Clue #2: The Fertiliser. In my reading, I learned that dyed mulch can rob gardens of the nitrogen they need, but fertiliser puts nitrogen back in. The former owners of our house told us they’d fertilised the plants more than once in the lead-up to us moving in (they left some extensive handover notes). This would have encouraged the spring growth and blooms we’d enjoyed when we first moved in but - if our neighbour was correct - they may have been too heavy-handed. One gardening website I looked up said, “Signs of over fertilization include stunted growth, burned or dried leaf margins, wilting, and collapse or death of plants.”
Check, check, check and check.
When the weather finally cooled (not until after Easter!), I leaped into action. First, I pulled out all the dead and burned up plants. So many dead and burned up plants! Next, I turned over the soil, stabbing it with a fork to break up the desiccated powder-rocks. Then I added in organic compost. Bags and bags and bags of organic compost, which I mixed in well with the “powder.” Finally, I covered all of it in a thick layer of organic sugarcane mulch, and let it rest.
That was three months ago. Weeds have sprouted up thickly through the sugarcane mulch (black-dyed wood-chips would have stopped them, I imagine), and yesterday, I finally found time to start pulling them out.
When I did, it was as though the soil was singing to me. Dark, damp, rich soil. Alive with tiny organisms, and filled with earthworms. So many earthworms! Some of them as big as my finger, happily wriggling through the lovely soil.
I feel very smug about those earthworms.
