More Compost Research Bears Fruit - Or Perhaps Earthworms

You can never have too much compost, too much mulch, or too many gardening books.

We stopped at our big mall today, so I went to the bookstore to drink coffee and check out new books. Instead, I found an old favorite - Let It Rot, by Stu Campbell.

I remembered the contents, almost word for word. I used Let It Rot - and many other books - to write The Wormhaven Gardening Book.

I lost my typewritten notes, rewrote the entire set, and found the originals when the notes were completed a second time. However, that proved to me that going over the same material one more time could create a synthesis that I missed before.

Today, I learned three new things about earthworms that made sense, based on my experience.

1. Newsprint Fanciers
One is that earthworms are especially good at attacking newsprint, which does not decompose easily, due to its lignin content. Lignin is the tough part of the cell, and earthworms love it.

Leave a stack of newspapers outside on the grass and they they will have a family reunion underneath.

I had a stump left on a concrete set of steps in Midland. When I finally moved the stump, about five plump earthworms were dwelling in peace and harmony beneath, with nothing more than wood to eat.

ELCA's failing seminary in Chicago bought compost tumblers and sanctified them to the cause of Mother Earth.

2. Cows Grazing on Bacteria
The second new/old fact concerns a description of the earthworm as "a cow grazing on bacteria." That explains why they get along so well in manure and reduce it so well. Bacteria are mostly protein, and earthworms are mostly muscle. The common element is nitrogen, the building block of all life, plant and animal.

All the soil/compost creatures also work to eliminate pathogens and toxins.

3. Temperature Zones for Bacteria
Composters get obsessed with their pile of debris heating up. Buy a compost thermometer! Buy the Ace Compost Tumbler to heat up the compost faster!

Various bacteria work in three different zones. The cold weather ones can work all winter, but they impart heat on the pile by digesting food, just as we do. Each human gives off as much heat as a light bulb.

Even in the freezer, bacteria increase in ice cream over time - reason enough to eat it quickly.

If the cold weather bacteria work too well, they warm it up for the mid-range bacteria. So the cold ones go away and the mid-range guys take over. As you might have guessed, the mid-range bacteria can repeat this and turn the work over to the heat-loving bacteria.

Thus God created bacteria for each kind of composting. A leaf pile may not warm up that much, because it lacks a concentration of nitrogen. Still, it will rot away in time, as my two years of leaves have shown. I have put in enough for three piles but they have reduced to 1/2 bin full.

This gardener has layered soil, grass, and straw. I only put leaves in mine, because I mulch the grass back into the lawn.

Some gardening books are just plain wrong about the simplest facts, with these errors repeated as people borrow their phony research.

Some are misled by modernism, spending time and trouble to defeat Creation while glorying in nature. Big machines must be better. If I buy one, I have to use it - and repair it.

My helper and I laid down newspaper and mulch and created an instant veggie garden, with only the alternate rows to be dug by hand. That took $20 in mulch and $0 in newspapers. All over the yard, sod is rotting under the mulch and feeding the plants

I read research tonight that tilling decimates the earthworm population, the very souls that decrease soil erosion with their constant tunneling. More farmers have moved to no-till and low-till for that reason and other considerations.

Farmers and gardeners value manure. An earthworm produces his own weight in castings every day. "That is so tiny, insignificant," say the scoffers. A ton of worms produces a ton of castings each day. As I recall, that is easily the weight of the worms in one acre of grassland. The numbers can be much higher. Anything that will produce that much improvement to the soil - for free - is going to be on Team Jackson, Garden Division.

Man's solo efforts with the soil are just like his work with the Word of God, when he imagines it belongs to him.

Some farm plots have turned to concrete from excess tilling and heavy use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. The soil dies and is no longer an ocean of life. In contrast, organic soil teems with creatures of all sizes and tasks, yet they work together in perfect harmony.

When man attacks the Word of God with human reason, he employs the same decimating skills. He makes up rules about the text and says, "Aha, that verse has to go." And he decides that the poor foolish disciples could not have been literate. Paul was literate, they allow, but he was a woman-hating obsessive kook. Worse, they tell everyone how they will improve their beloved church. They rip out the pipe organs to make room for coffee bars and ticky-tacky bands. Finding discord in doctrine, they avoid such trivia, in favor of the generics of love, joy, and fund-raising. Unable to write a sermon about what they do not believe, they steal the words of other apostates.