Keeping In Touch

My opportunities to work in the garden have been intermittent due to work and weather. 'Kinda funny considering that I work with weather forecasters. Earthworms have been surfacing everywhere because of all the rain we get. We seem to get long rainy periods of 3-4 days to as much as a week. Depressing but it's good for the soil.

During last Tuesday and Saturday's garden outings, I weeded and shoveled. Plenty of earthworms show up in my soil, and they do a great job, so I'm trying to make their work a little easier by adding sand. Gardening is a much more enjoyable context to see earthworms than watching another kid dare to swallow one (which even as a kid I thought it was childish and cruel), or destroying one in biology class disections. What was I supposed to see? Why does it have to be alive when we pin it down?

It seems like the soil has a lot of clay. It clumps more now than it did earlier (see March 2 entry). It came up as large wedges that require me to break them up with the shovel or garden fork. So, that's one more reason for adding sand. And maybe some kind of loamy "stuff" to lighten it.

A dandelion clump I dug to take home for my guinea pigs held a lot of dirt. An earthworm fell to the ground as I was shaking off the dirt -- again -- at my car. I picked up the earthworm and walked back to my plot where I set it on loosened soil and covered it with a thin layer.

I found the earthworm remarkably cold. Maybe that's the temp of the soil right now. It chilled me. So glad am I to not be an earthworm. So glad am I that they like my dirt.