The lovely pink pages of the Financial Times will serve as worm food, and a reminder that real wealth begins in the dirt.
The end of the second week of the brand new food garden. I showed you how to put a simple compost pile on one end of the new garden a couple of days ago. Today is simple and quick; covering the rest of the garden with some newspapers, chopped up leaves, dirt, straw, whatever you have that might provide a bit of a buffer from the cold of winer…but if you are thinking about that spare roll of pink fiberglass insulation you’ve got in the garage, just say no. Speaking of pink: I scored an armload of the Financial Times at the local dump. What could be prettier than to tuck my worms in with nice thick pink sheets of Britain’s version of the Wall Street Journal?
Why are we bothering to tuck the garden in? We basically took the roof off of a patch of dirt when we removed the sod, and in so doing, we’ve exposed the soil microorganisms and earthworms to the elements. This will not make them happy. And we want them to continue to work the soil more thoroughly and further into the winter then they’ve been used to doing under the sod. In fact, I chose very deliberately to leave the soil intact, neither tilling nor digging it up, to minimize any disruption of the microbial colonies and the worm channels and nurseries.
Good food for the wild worms. Cover with 8-10 inches of straw to insulate our little friends from the killing cold of winter.
So what we’ll do is simply put some stuff that worms like to eat (leaves, newspaper, uncured compost) on the surface of the soil, and then encourage them to come up to the surface by insulating with a thick layer of straw.
I had a little bit of uncured compost and some composted manure left, so I spread lawn-mowered leaves on the third of the garden in front of the compost pile, tossed the compost over that, and scatted about 8 inches of straw over it all. When I ran out of compost, I put down newspaper, including, of course, the Financial Times, threw about an inch of dirt over the paper, and then put the rest of my straw down.
That’s it. The last straw for the new garden. Nothing to do but pray for snow…to provide another layer of insulation, and wait until spring.