My easier, better soil, no fuss, less work, composting

Thanks for the link, soulgardenlove.

Double digging use to be the "trend" about 15 years ago. Not much appeal and a lot of work. If I remember correctly it originated in France. People I know who tried it were not impressed.

I see alot of newspaper and mulch, but where do the plants grow. The soil....

Well, after a winter of weathering, the leaves, mulch, newspapers, and whatever disintegrate and it makes a planting medium that is quite nice. I planted perennials the following spring and they did quite well. In your TX climate you may have to judge for yourself how to proceed...

If you go to the Amazon Lasagna book link and click on 'search inside' you can read several pages that will give a good explanation...

The Brits continue to be big proponents of Double Digging and I see quite a few references on the French gardening sites, too. They are known to be great gardeners, so I don't think we can just toss out the concept; but, for me I would have to have a really compelling reason to do it these days in our soil here...

Am doing my 'Wintersowing' this weekend. Another 'E-Z Does It' gardening technique and fun, too.

Thanks, tabsco, for your reply. I will google and search out lasagna gargening.

What I like about double digging is being able to remove the rocks, and there are plenty here. And you can plant stuff right away. Which reminds me, soulgardenlove, did you grow your roses in lasagna beds? How soon did you plant them? I live on a busy street and I wanted to get my bed out front planted as quickly as possible, but I'm lasagna-ing some in the side and back this winter.

Illoquin, the White Flower Farm book does mention adding humus and cow manure.

French intensive gardening has been around since the 1800's - it uses double digging, but double digging has been around as long as there have been shovels.

p.s. I'm not dead or crazy and I'm not getting divorced, even though She won't help in the garden at all, let alone wield a pick axe!

Dang, Claypa, all our hopes are dashed!

Maybe I added stuff, it was a long time ago, but as I recall, there wasn't a lot of money to be spent on bagged ammendments. I was mostly trying to say I didn't notice any difference, but then I had a 48" diam (plus the tail) concrete slab underneath where I dug, so my results cannot be valid anyway. On the otherhand, it is mightly fine now, so maybe I did do some good.

I was young, oh, so young, and though it was hard work, it was oddly sort of fun. I could not begin to do that double digging today.

Suzy

Claypa, wow.. maybe I wouldn't have been so strongly worded and opinionated had i realized anyone still did that!! OPPS!! I go for vast quantity in my garden and I still think the quality of my plants are great due specifically to what is contained in the top 12 inches of soil. I try to put down horse manure and abundant amounts of leaf mold on top of my clay. I mulch with the leaf mold too. When I'm digging, if I reach past the black and hit orange clay, I just mix it on the spot and plant... the easy way :) Oh, and just because i don't double dig, doesn't mean I'm not somewhat crazy still.. I am. Anyone who's pulled weeds in the rain and by light of a lantern is a little crazy I think :)

Suzy, I still refuse to buy bagged amendments full price when I can get all this great organic matter.. It would take a bank loan to buy all the bags worth I've used of free organic materials I've spread.

Susan

Yar preaching to the choir, but the first few years we lived here I didn't get that compost pile going because I needed the leaves for another project.

We didn't bag the leaves, but I needed them desperately to build a little woods off to the side of the house. I think for 3 or 4 years, every single leaf got blown into that area to kill the grass and make a woods. You'd never in a million years guess that 28 years ago it was pristine lawn, well, after 28 years, I guess yo uwould, but 6 or 7 years after I thin you would havebee amwazed. :)) My neighbors weren't too happy, but the last of them who remember the beautiful green lawn have moved away.

Now, leaves in my neighborhood are a nightmare. The trees are all gigantic and leaves are ankle deep or deeper everywhere. Several neighbors saw Mr. Clean getting rid of leaves by blowing them off to the side and have done similar things in their back yards. Or they have seen us take the leaves to the back, and have started their own compost (technically leaf mold) piles.

Compare this to when we moved in and every neighbor blew or raked the leaves to the street and burned them at the curb!!! Huge long piles of them! I am dead serious. We moved in in late Oct and met most of the neighbors while they were burning leaves on/near the street.

Now said neighbors are getting older and they have their leaves done...they get taken away in a truck and no one knows what happenes to them. We do have people come down from the burbs looking for leaf bags in our trash, and we have to send them 2 doors down to one of the few people who still bags them.

Suzy

Nothing stays the same does it??

Funny how trees seem to grow so slow and then 10 years goes by and all of a sudden they are so much bigger... just like kids!

Sgl: re - pull weeds in rain, etc. For the record: WE ARE NOT CRAZY, just resourceful!

My sons bought me a chipper/shredder last year. At first I couldn't figure out what to do with it. The slot is only ~ 2 by 8 inches, maybe less. Sticks kept jamming the blades. But I have a tendency to wait things out until my little brain can figure out to make use of something.

This year my good husband made me a fenced garden at the side of his shop. The heavy wire fence (hog wire?) forms a half circle or oval at the far end. I don't like straight lines. About 5 feet outside the perimeter he made set posts and a rebar strand for muscadine grapes that I transplanted from other places. I know I'm not explaining this well. It's kind of a half-oval outside another half-oval.

Inside the garden we piled horse manure and rotted hay. I forked it into rows, more or less a spiral shape (like I've seen in permaculture books). I raked up several big loads of oak leaves, then filled a 5 gallon bucket with them, crushing them slightly with my hands, then fed them into the shredder to make a well-chopped and more compact mixture that I spread onto my garden rows. I'm going to put landscape fabric (nursery grade) between the rows and in front of the grapesvines. I also use cardboard and whole leaves as a kill mulch to cut down on weeding around fruit plants.

Long story short, no double digging for my soil's microbes. I'm building up soil like soulgardenlove.

I double dug my entire vegetable garden (40 X 60) a very long time ago.
That's what was recommended at the time. And after I did all this, I decided to install raised beds (!). If I only knew then what I know now...
What I can recommend for those that have to deal with CLAY, is to get ahold of a spading fork, & push it into the soil - in other words, break open the top layer by piercing, but DON'T dig!
On top of this, layer all your leaves, manure, whatever, & proceed as in the Lasagna method. This has speeded the process up where I have heavy clay - as in Blue clay that has a super-fine tight structure. I usually plunge a shovel in just out of curiousity: I like to see what's going on underground! Other than that, I layer & exercise patience: it works well.

"resourceful'.. I like it. :) The ones just starting out and reading this thread wont ever know how much more work they could have done :)

Maypop, I'm glad all the soil builders have found this thread!

The only reason to turn soil is to fluff it up. When the OM content is 10% or greater the native worms will maintain excellent soil conditions for you. Permanent mulches by any name help maintain nice tilth. All systems can do better at maintaing excellent tilth when the compression from us walking in our gardens is decreased or eliminated.

What I have not seen here is any discussion of using pieces of planking to establish walkways and reduce compression. Home gardeners can do this. Larger growers may not go to this extreme because of the equipment used in farming. Think of your planks or board pieces as very long term mulch. They will not reduce the effect of any other form of permanent mulch. Of course I would not use treated lumber. If you pick slugs they will be found under your walkway boards.

Native worms? I think there is no such critter. The earthworms we call the gardener's friends are actually European stowaways from colonial times.

In fact, they are not good for forests, especially in the Northeast. They eat the leaf mulch too fast and rob natural soil habitats of nutrients. The roly-polies, which everyone thinks are bad, are a natural part of forest duff, as are microorganisms such as fungi that many plants depend on. And if these plants are starved out of existence, the insects and other wildlife that use them also go away.

Sara Stein wrote a wonderful book--Noah's Garden--years ago about the complicated connections between soil and plants and animals. It is definitely not a science book. It is very readable and helped me understand the importance of keeping nature alive on my own property. One more reason I try not to tip over the soil any more than I have to.

I suppose one can find support for any position concerning the presence of earthworms which populate the soils of the whole world.

It would be difficult for me to believe that the worms of the world and all the wonderfull good they provide would be eliminated or cited in any one instance as not good for that portion of the living world.

I wonder from which soils the rest of the world was populated because the worms of one area are not at all necessarily related to the worms of any other area.

I wonder why the American soils would have been been denied this step within evolution or the hands of the Creator.

I wonder why any living plant would be worse off because of the presence of worms whose casts are of a much higher fertilizer value than if what they have eaten in the first place just rots in place.

There are a whole bunch of questions one would have to confront the originator of an aledged worm problem in the forests anywhere. I suspect it may take us back to baloney being spread at the suggestion of those who would like to sell a chemical fix to the forestry departments. The problems created by man are the demise of our great forests not the lowly earthworm which will be a part of the rebuilding if we can correct some of our "Man damage".

All are right when they say our living trees do not seem as healthy and strong as they once were.
Some are right when they say more and more disease and insect damage seems to pop up. Few acknowledge that nature wipes out the weak and frail first in order to find a stronger species.

Would you believe that do-gooders stopped a Pennsylvania State University controlled use of midnight soil to the coal stripping areas where it is very difficult to grow anything. I guess they would rather accept mine acid run off as compaired to biologically charged healthy soil run off to make downsteam waysides even more healthy. Yes indeed that did actually happen. What a shame.

I've read of that to, maypop. There was an article in National Geograpic if recall correctly.

Doc, what is midnight soil? I've never heard that term. And why would anyone stop an effort to rehab the mess made by strip mining? We have natural gas in Louisiana, but people are complaining about the high prices, so the electric company wants to convert power plants here from gas to coal! I'd rather have nuclear--it's less damaging to the planet than coal. Coal is the biggest polluter in the world.

Dean, you're right--National Georgraphis is where I read about earthworms, in an article about Jamestown. A great article, if someone wants to read about the history of agriculture in the US. The colonists were so pig-headed about doing things the European way. The Indians lived close to nature in a nomadic life style, using slash-and-burn agriculture that opened the forest to grasslands and shrubs for wildlife. After a while, they moved on and let the land recover naturally. But the English insisted on doing things the old way (and some of them starved to death).
Here is one of many articles about earthworms.

"Scientists believe that earthworms were once native to North America, but most died off when the northern half of the continent was buried under glaciers.

Small populations lingered in pockets of warmer soils, in the southeastern United States and along the Pacific Coast. Now most earthworms in the country are descended from immigrants.

When the worms first arrived is hard to say, but scientists think they may have followed Europeans. Wherever humans have worked the soil, Dr. Hendrix said, exotic earthworms have been introduced."

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/110507/news_20071105041.shtml

Midnight Soil is a term I maybe should not have used. I think it goes back to the war and early knowlege of oriental nations that gathered human waste and placed it on their crop lands after most were in bed sleeping.....thus Midnight Soil.

We have cities making and selling the same from their treatment plants. Yet other cities and areas in our country leagally prohibit such action. Such was the case with the university strip mining soils placement of their human waste plant compost.

I frankly am not concerned just how those fine earthworms pervailed or arrived. They are a blessing to any soil they inhibit. They have become native over the years. I live just below the southern edge of the ice flows in Pennsylvania. By now the native worms could have gone north or the imported could have been moved north and eastward. Science is only guessing in this instance. Some may have crossed lines and created new lines of worms. They all do us a great favor. I know there have been differing opinions. However the worm hurting mountains theory is just plain wrong. All those worms make casts and cause the conditions to be better in all cases. We can not always trust what a single or few individuals come up with. We never quite know for sure who is paying for such hogwash or why. Sometimes it may be that the professor needs to be published. Every one needs at least one book. Science has been wrong so many times we observe from a distance. Science can fix rockets and build smart bombs. Beyond a shadow of a doubt they should leave soil matters to the field of bilology. Only biological recovery will restore the damage that has been done. Hopefully we have not gone to far in the wrong direction.

I hold a bit of stock in a few well known chemical companies. It scares me to know just a few of the recent human medicine errors. Some pretty serious stuff happening there. Fewer eyes have been or continue to be on the soil additives and amendments. It really bothers me that Merk is running the last boo boo into the statute of limitations using the power of emense company legal skills to avoid paying damages to anyone. Nothing new here....I just thought they might be big and strong enough to help those that have been hurt.

Is 'Milorganite' what you are talking about?

The conversation is really interesting. I have just returned from a day out with my kids in Atlanta and we saw the IMAX "Sea Monsters, A Prehistoric Adventure". It relates to the earthworm conversation in that all living species past and present have had to adapt to their ever changing physical environment or they have died. It could be said that enormous 25 foot long fish were once native to Kansas, as their skeletal remains have been found there, but of course it was covered by an ocean at the time. Sure, earthworms weren't below the surface when there was ice all over the northern part of this continent, but neither were the plants and animals those states now call native. As those habitats have changed, so have the flora and fauna, including earthworms.

I too am suspect that earth worms are causing the demise of forests as I believe earthworms promote growth and life. I would have to see the article and the logical reasoning behind their theory that the worms are a detriment to the forests and be convinced that it is truly a cause-effect relationship. Does anyone have a link or can you tell me where to find it?

I schlep through beds where I know I should place the occasional stepping stone, but I pretend I weigh less and think I'm just keeping my worms in business when I delicately compact the soil :) I know better though..

This is a great article about worms and why they are so great :) Personally, I can't get enough of them.. in my garden that is :)

http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/agriculture/forums/organic-agriculture/msg00020.html

Building Your Soil
The Role of Earthworms in Healthy Soils

The earthworm has all but been forgotten in modern agriculture. Many common practices like frequent tillage, fertilizing with anhydrous ammonia, heavy pesticide use, and weed-free farming have led to its demise. So much of what the earthworm used to do for free, we now have to do with tractors and chemicals. Here is a summary of some of the many benefits derived from healthy earthworm populations, along with a list of suggestions and a few tips on what you can do to bring them back

Earthworms Churn the Soil and Make it Porous
They improve the soil mix by helping it achieve the proper air, water, and solids ratio for maximum plant growth. Without them, we find it necessary to continually rip, disc, and springtooth the ground. Unknowingly, we further compact the soil while trying to "uncompact" it.

Earthworms Improve Water Infiltration Rates
Its maze of tunnels increases the soils ability to absorb water. Without their activity, we are left to apply expensive materials to improve permeability, such as gypsum or some form of calcium. While these are good materials to apply to most soils and can do much good, they would be much less necessary if earthworms were present.

Earthworms Neutralize Soil pH
Analysis of earthworm castings, or earthworm manure, shows that the soil that comes out of the back end of an earthworm is closer to a neutral pH (7) than what goes in the front end, regardless of whether the existing soil is above or below pH (7). This is achieved by the action of the worms calciferous gland and the buffering action of carbonic acid. Think of all the limestone applications we have had to make to do what the earthworm used to do naturally.

Earthworms Bring Up Minerals and Make Plant Nutrients More Available
Soil which has passed through the gut of an earthworm shows much more available phosphorus and potassium than the same soil which has not passed through the worm. Without the worms, you might as well enter your chemical supplier's phone number into your phone's memory for rapid dialing.

Earthworms Stimulate Microbial Populations
Free living nitrogen fixing bacteria are more numerous around the sides of the earthworm burrows. The mucous lining of the burrows are excellent sources of nutrients and ideal rooting environments. By contrast, we must till and fertilize to create good root growth. While tilling to create looser soil for easier root growth, we destroy many roots and root hairs.

Earthworms Compost Plant Residues
The activity of the earthworm gut is like a miniature composting tube that mixes, conditions, and inoculates plant residues. The earthworm removes plant litter from the soil surface, turning it into free manure. Farms without many earthworms must buy more off-farm fertilizers and often end up buying compost "starting" agents called field sprays, which are wholly unnecessary in soils with high earthworm counts.

Higher Earthworm Populations Go Hand in Hand with Reduced Harmful Nematode Counts
As yet, the exact reasons are unclear, but soil with earthworms invariably has less parasitic nematodes than soil without earthworms. Earthworms are the best indicator yet of healthy soils. Good soils contain a wide range of beneficial organisms which are directly stimulated by the activities of earthworms. These organisms trap, strangle, eat, and simply crowd out the plant-eating nematodes. By contrast, soils without earthworms and a healthy microbiology must be fumigated prior to planting. This fumigation kills both good and bad organisms indiscriminately. While fumigation may guarantee a "clean" start for a young plant, its protective action is fairly short-lived. When the nematodes return, and they always do, there will be little there to deter their proliferation.

Encouraging Earthworm Return
Check your soils to see how well they are doing. If your soils don't have high earthworm counts, begin to encourage their return by:

Planting cover crops.
Administering manures and compost.
Reducing tillage.
Trying to keep the soil "covered" with a layer of mulch such as shreddings and mowing as often as possible.
Earthworms will definitely increase as conditions improve.

A Few Tips on Cultivation and Cover Crops
Earthworm activities are deeply affected by cultivation, pesticide and fertilizer applications and by cultural practices. Ploughing decreases the abundance of earthworm communities. A study in England found that after 25 years of cultivation, earthworm populations decreased by roughly 85 percent. It was found that each cultivation killed approximately one percent of the population. But this was deep ploughing. Light cultivation had little direct effect on populations. However, one indirect effect of any form of cultivation is increased soil compaction, which does adversely affect earthworms. Although the top five inches of ground has been loosened, below is ploughpan which hardens with each repeated pass.

The negative effects of cultivation can be offset by the use of cover crops and organic fertilizers. These practices improve the microclimatic condition in the topsoil and provide nutritive resources. The effects of inorganic fertilizers on earthworms is variable. We do know, however, that fertilizers such as ammonium sulfate can be damaging because they increasing soil acidity. In some incidences, whole populations have been wiped out. Liming acid soils generally increases earthworm populations.

The effects of pesticides on earthworm populations are just as variable. Organochlorides, such as Chlordane, certain organophosphates, and carbamates are especially harmful. On the other hand, most herbicides seem to be harmless, except where their use has greatly decreased the worm's food supply.

In Conclusion
When considering earthworms, you may want to think of the things that the $500 per acre fumigation doesn't provide: No improved mineral content, no improved permeability, no improved beneficial organism count, and no improved fertility. On top of that, it kills all your earthworms.

Earthworms are always working to make the soil better, not only for their own survival and reproduction, but also for the healthy survival of their primary food source, the residues from your crops. Earthworms are truly the farmer's best friend. And one last added benefit: they provide free fishing bait.

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
im soooo glad i found this thread !!!
ok so i have some acreage and it is woods and 9 acres of old soy bean fields and corn.
So i got my work cut out for me getting this old field to once again be a fertile ,rich soil.
So i got leaves coming out my wazooo and was thinking of using them as mulch for the garden.
We are also digging a basement . Thinking i might use that soil in the garden. It is from the woods.
I will absolutley get that book on lasagna gardening
No more digging . Can it be .
sue

There's a thread about worms and forests in the Trees and Shrubs forum, lots of links and opinions:

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/719039/

I read the online Athens link and I'm not convinced by this article.. It's not enough for me. To say that they hopped over from Japan and are destroying the trees..when Japan has the most amazing forests and trees and gardens and some of what is in my garden originally came from Japan.. I need more to believe these guys are bad! :)

Susan

Yes Sue, it can be! No more digging :)

Thanks Claypa, I'll check it out. :)

Susan

Not buying into that one. Pleeeeze! Unless these worms are close personal friends of Gozilla that is.......LOL

Great link Claypa
thanks
Yes i too have a hard time wondering how a worm hijacked to America ?
Thanks Susan
i am learining alot from this :)
eehehehehe Doccat Godzilla, i love them old movies
maybe they hijacked on Motheria the giant moth
sue

Now THERE'S a possibility, they've mistaken a giant moth larva for a worm????? LOL

There you have :)

Here is part of one article about earthworms. If you're interested in the topic, please check out the site. There are many others that say the same thing. Just type in "earthworms forest" and you'll see 10,000 sites expressing essentially the same view on the subject, very few disagreements.

"Görres said that while earthworms do an excellent job of recycling nutrients, "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."

"All this is not to say that earthworms aren't beneficial. In fact, Amador believes that worms could be used in place of some of the fertilizers used in agriculture."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/06/030625090207.htm

Some scientists are even more critical of their role in forests. A very interesting subject.

Equillibrum has a good article on his thead called Attack of the killer worms .
who would have thunk that worms could be the cause of so much controvesy :) lol

Well now..........in Northcentral Pensylvania's mountains the trees have matured. The canopy literally eliminates sunlight reaching the forest floors. The forest floor is covered by fern and rodadendron so thick one can not walk through in many many acres. The brambles and other previously valued floor plants are non existant. There is no brouse in a normal sense.The deer population is to high. They eat literally everything that germinates including trillium and all of the mushrooms. The PH is about 5.5 and worsening as the wind from the west brings us more acids.

Over the last five years we have diminished the deer herd by a very large percentage. Still there is no recovery worth mentioning. By fencing and complete elimination of the deer recovery is very factual within four years. This certainly can not be done to prove anything but the facts concerning deer in our acreage. The recovery does not show us anything that can not live and grow at a PH 6. or lower.

There are literally no worms in the mountain soils which were historically under the deep freeze during the ice age. The top soil hardly exists yet the trees grow nicely but very slow. We are in what is called the second growth cutting. It took a hundred years to produce a marketable second growth. There were few if any earthworms to eat anything in these forests. I have a second home (translated hunting camp) right in the middle of all this. It is a sad sight to see and a difficult situation to ponder.

Without major management changes concerning all of the regeneration needs there will not be a following crop outside of trash ferns and a weed called rotadendron following the harvest of our second growth.

I know deer are terrible nuisances, but part of the problem is that human housing and agriculture and industry have shrunk wildlife habitats drastically. I am surrounded by pine plantations, which don't provide much food for anything except squirrels maybe. So my land is their dining hall. Deer, rabbits, possums, raccoons. They hit my blueberries, grapes, purt'near anything we grow. Peas are the favorite of deer.

As for real forests with earthworms, we don't have many of them. Loggers clearcut right up to streams. The only time we let loggers on our land was to take out some naturallly occurring big pines that had become infested from pine bark beetles--a result of monoculture on neighbors' properties.

Hey Maypop..........try snow peas. Two years I grew them and the deer left them alone. They may have been on a pea diet but I doubt that very much. We like snow peas better than shelled peas anyway. That being said just watch. This year they will like snow peas. :)

Sorry to hear you have critter problems. I think to one degree or another most of us surburbies have critter problems. Our state has extended hunting seasons in our area which has helped some. The birds of prey seem to handle the smaller critters. My major headache is groundhogs. Eleven whistle pigs (ground hogs) were put down on my small property alone last summer. One snuck in and burrowed in right under my nose. We smoked that one in the den. I can do literally nothing but shoot because of neighborhood burrows I can not get to with the smoke bombs.

What? What? What? Worms are bad? Good Grief! Big or small I welcome them all. So, they were wiped out by glaciation? Hogwash! Even in Alaska, we have big ones (not the nightcrawler size, but, 6 inchers when the summer is in high gear, 60-70F) and smaller ones all the time. Eats too much forest duff? We have to scrape 5 feet down to find real dirt under trees! No Lasagna layering up here either. In 3 years we would still have the layers unless we added something to heat it up, Like manure, fishmeal, grass clippings, coffee grounds and a little last year's compost to give it the microbiology network for a start. I don't turn, but I do compost all at once to get some heat and keep the heat up by adding the layers and keeping it moist. The ground freezes in Sept and thaws in June/July, including the compost pile. The layers have insulating value in that the compost pile is frozen to the ground, all 5 feet of it and requires me raking it as it thaws each sunny day to claim my 'black gold.'
I have to vote for worms being good, no matter where they came from.
Carol

And between Carol and I are a lot of mixed mountain and mountain farms. As far as I know the farm lands and mixed farm and woodlot lands all have nightcrawlers and other varieties too.

I have read articles making bad worm claims. I write them all off as very poorly organized baloney most likely written by one with little or no experience of what he professes to write about.
Then that professor tags one of his academic buddys and agrees to make the buddys book his book for next semesters students and his book gets ordered by the buddy for the same purpose. In this case when it happens several hundred students have mostly wasted their time in those classes. I suspect all students have had this experience. I know for sure I did on several occasions.

Doc...like the academic that invented double digging! :)

Hi Carol! Yes, I guess in Alaska all bets are off using this method and you probably do need some heat generation if your ever going to make soil out of it :)

More urban areas, ours included are seeing coyotes encroaching.. and it's not because their natural areas are being destroyed, its because the food sources are greater and easier in more populated areas.. and we've never ever seen them before and they are here to stay... Things change.. habitats change..it's the only constant.

I guess all I have to say about the worm "problem" is that again, ...the only constant is change and there is no use worrying about change that is inevitable. Habitats change over time and nobody is going to stop an underground army of worms no matter where they are from. I got a real good chuckle reading the part of that article that said the methane released from worms adds to greenhouse gasses? I didn't realize worms had such a bad gas problem. Worms and my kids.. who knew?

:)

Susan

Susan................worms, your kids and the horrible beagle resting at your feet during morning coffee.
Now that is a red necker way to start the day! I'll tell 'em Susan....Folks if you don't have a dog you can not possibly know what you are missing. :)

Having experienced all of the above I do not understand why worms, kids and dogs have not been accused of causing the global warming problems. Do not overlook old folks. I think I shall ask Hilleroischus what her position is on this important issue. I'll bet anyone a hundred bucks she has never swallowed a live worm. Maybe I won't waste my time. :)

soulgardenlove: Thanks for this thread. Ive just finished an article for Dave's Garden on No-Dig Gardening: Sustainable Alternative to the Rototiller. Its an overview to the method of gardening that you have just presented here, so now I can link to what you have just said here.

gloria