Nature Blog by Jenny Bourne
Views and opinions expressed in this Nature Blog are those of the author.
Hallowe'en Dig/no dig
Date posted: Thursday 31st October 2024
A mild, overcast and damp day for Hallowe’en; some of this season’s pumpkins and squashes will be being carved into scary faces, with a (well supervised!) tea light glowing inside for later this evening. Meanwhile I’ve been harvesting the last of the dried beans from this year’s abundant climbing French beans crop and collecting seeds from the perennials, leaving up a lot of the stalks and stems for over-wintering insects to shelter in.
We are having our usual debate about dig/no dig, as one of us is an enthusiastic digger and I’m firmly behind the principle of ‘letting it lie’! At the moment our plots aren’t arranged into no-dig raised beds that seem to work best for access and mulching. For the time being the principle of mulching and adding well-rotted manure and organic materials to cover the soil through the winter will do the trick. Luckily our soil is full of worms and invertebrates after over twenty years of adding organic matter, in a (sort of) rotational scheme, with hungry crops such as the summer fruiting squash, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and legumes needing more, less for the roots. We need to nurture and cherish this precious and invaluable natural resource.
In this month’s ‘RHS The Garden’ there is a very interesting article about soil that charts some of the historic research that has shed light on the importance of the teeming life that sustains the soil beneath our feet, starting, of course with earth worms and Darwin: ‘In his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms, published in 1881…It asserts that “all the vegetable mould over the whole country has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canals of worms.” One thrilling sentence and our modern concept of soil was born. Darwin suggested the fertile layer might better be known as animal mould, so important were earthworms to its formation. Had he had and up-to-date laboratory, he might have called it animal, vegetable, fungal, bacterial, protozoic and viral mould. A fistful of earth contains billions of organisms…’ (Ben Dark, To Dig or not to dig? RHS The Garden November 2024).
Dark cites Gilbert White, the Hampshire curate naturalist as a forerunner of the no dig movement, being the first to recognise earthworms as essential components in an ecological system: ‘Gilbert White was the first to write, in a letter dated 20 May 1770, of earthworms in ecological terms…” Earth-worms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm.” And his description of their interaction with plants could grace a gardening book of 2024: ‘worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation…Which would proceed but lamely without them, by boring, perforating and loosening the soil, and rendering it pervious to rains and the fibres of plants, by drawing straws and stalks of leaves and twigs into it, and, most of all, by throwing up such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called worm-casts, which, being their excrement, is a fune manure for grain and grass.”’
The organic matter that we chuck on to the soil every autumn and spring works because of those life forms under our spades: ‘Contrary to common assumption, organic matter doesn’t improve soil texture through it’s mere presence, but through the life of the hordes that feed upon it. All that amoebic movement and primordial digestion requires secreted slime, which binds particles like butter in a crumble mix. Compost enables sand to form water-retaining aggregates and clay to ball into porous lumps, all largely thanks to the mucus-heavy existence of earthworms and other life sustained by it.’ (Ben Dark, To Dig or not to dig? RHS The Garden November 2024).
So as the Hallowe’en spooky costumes and customs are unleashed tonight let’s give a toast to the slimy work of the worms and all the other microscopic invertebrates that create that primordial digestion that’s going on beneath our wellies if we leave the ecosystems and soil biodiversity to do their thing, feeding the top layers with leaf mould, mulch and all that rich organic material!
Happy Hallow’en!
Jenny Bourne 31.10.24
All views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author only