The soil that supports your garden plants is an extremely complex material, the make-up of which varies with the nature of the underlying rocks. These rocks provide the bulk of the soil’s mineral content, sometimes known as the soil skeleton. However, a mature soil also has a significant organic content which is derived from the many organisms that live and die in it.
With a wildlife population ranging from the microscopic bacteria that play a vital role in recycling the nutrients, through worms and other creep-crawlies to moles, your soil is a living community. Forget this and your garden will suffer.
Most gardeners take little notice of the worms that are brought up with almost every forkful of soil. However, Charles Darwin reckoned the earthworm to be the most important animal in the history of the world. A 1000m2 plot of good garden loam may support 25,000 worms which, by pushing and chewing their way through the soil, can create up to 5km (3miles) of new tunnels each day! Although the individual tunnels may not last very long, they do play a major role in draining and aerating the soil – and Darwin realized this is vital for the well-being of plant roots. Worms also enrich the soil by dragging dead leaves into it and bringing mineral-rich material up to the surface layers where it can be used by plant roots. The alkaline nature of worm-casts promotes the growth of certain vitamin-secreting bacteria, and the vitamin improves root growth and crop yield. Be aware of this if you are tempted to use a worm-killer on your lawn. A healthy soil is surely worth a few worm-casts.
Michael Chinery
Watch worms at work by making a simple wormery with two glass sheets separated by a length of stout rope and held in place by bulldog clips. Fill the wormery with layers of garden soil, sand and potting compost, and put some dead leaves on the surface. Water well and add four or five worms. Put the wormery in a black polythene bag. After a day or so you will find the soil layers mixed and the leaves dragged into the worms’ tunnels.
Remember also that treating your flowers and vegetables to organic manure is far better for the worms than spraying them with chemical fertilizers. Worms feed on organic matter and you have only to look in your compost heap to see how well they flourish when surrounded by rotting vegetation.
Michael Chinery
Centipedes are often mistakenly called ‘wireworms’. Numerous joints enable them to bend their bodies in any direction.
Michael Chinery
Half in and half out of their burrows, these earthworms snuggle up and dig their bristles into each other before they exchange sperm. Each worm then withdraws into its own burrow and lays its eggs. Earthworms are hermaphrodite with both male and female organs in each individual.
Slugs are often described as snails without shells, but a few slugs do have a tiny shell, perched on the rear end of the body and looking like a little finger nail. These tapering, yellowish slugs spend most of their time under the ground, where they feed entirely on earthworms. The slug shoots out its spiky tongue to impale a passing worm and then sucks it in like a piece of spaghetti.
Michael Chinery
You might unearth one of these shelled slugs while you are turning over the vegetable patch, but you are more likely to find them under large stones or paving slabs that have not been disturbed for a while.