Now, I understand that I am not considered cute. I don’t have a soft fluffy coat, or puppy dog eyes or even have eyes for that matter. But we are garden’s hardest workers, we are ‘nature’s ploughs’, we are important. But we are declining.
We provide a range of benefits to your garden. Firstly, we love to eat rotting organic material, which means that we excrete castings that are high in nitrogen and phosphate. A brilliant natural fertiliser! We burrow through the soil, being ‘nature’s ploughs’ allowing oxygen and water to reach the roots of plants and grass. This channelling and burrowing loosens the soil, which in turn improve soil drainage.
Overall, we help to improve your soil structure, its water movement, nutrient cycling, plant growth, provide channels for root growth and we increase the soil’s microbial diversity. If you have loads of us in your garden, it’s a sign that your garden system is healthy. If not, there are a number of ways you can encourage us back.
If you build it, we will come.
Adding our favourite food source, organic material like compost, to your garden we will actively seek it out and we will travel quite far distances to do so. Our skin is very delicate, and we absorb anything you add to the soil, so please stop using pesticides and chemicals. These burn our skin and cause us to die, along with many other organisms in our eco system. Ensure you give your garden a long, deep watering, so that the water penetrates deep into the soil, as we like to live in cool moist areas. This will also encourage our deep-burrowing species to your garden, not just surface and upper soil species.
We provide a lot of benefits to your garden and help to ensure that you have a healthy system. We are just as important as bees, so please take these few steps to help encourage us to your area.
Willie the Worm
