Do you think there are fewer worms around than there used to be? Or is it that, in the case of the gardener rather than the farmer, you are using so much manufactured compost and working mostly in pots and small beds? Or is it that you are using pesticides with a heavy hand? For, surely, worms couldn't live through a barrage of chemicals. There never seems to be any shortage of slaters (or woodlice, if you must), and slugs and snails do very well at this time of year. (So much so that a garden path where seed is put down for pigeons and other birds, of which a portion is always left in the evening, suddenly crawls with slugs and snails. Or did, until the master of the house saw a great opportunity, and swept up from the concrete 80 huge examples which he fed to his nightly badgers. The next dusk, he got only 40 and then 20.) Anyway, back to worms. Charles Darwin seems to have been the first to examine in detail the life of the earthworm. He wrote: "Worms prepare the ground in an excellent manner for the growth of fibrous-rooted plants and for seedlings of all kinds. They periodically expose the mould to the air and sift it so that no stones larger than the particles which they can swallow - are left in it . . . worms likewise drag an infinite number of dead leaves and other parts of plants into their burrows, partly for the sake of plugging them up and partly for good."
There are five different sorts - apart from that awful illegal import, the roundworm, which many of us have not seen. Dr D. G. Hessayon in his Armchair Book of the Garden, names and illustrates five different sorts. To the untrained eye, not so very different, except in size, but the good Doctor dismisses something most of us believe about worms - that, if cut in half, the two live on. Not so. They generally die. On the other hand, when the tail end is severed, new segments are formed and soon the worm is "as good as new." When the head is severed, the injured worm stays immobile for about a couple of months, by which time a new head is regenerated. It then wiggles away. There is a new word about - new here anyway - vermicomposting. In this, worms are added to your compost heap or preferably bin.
And you can buy a kilo of them, it appears, containing about one thousand to four thousand of mixed size - and after you buy them, they work for free, as Michael Lynch of Irish Earthworm Company, Farnivale, Bandon, puts it, turning waste into a valuable soil conditioner. This is, again, taken from the magazine Organic Matters.