COMPOST HAPPENS, REDUX

There are all kinds of changes involved in a big move like we've made. Neither Stu nor I can quite believe one 180 degree attitude change of mine, and it has to do with worms.

As a child my response to living things was pretty much based on the presence or absence of a spine. There wasn't a reptile, bird, or mammal that scared me. 6 foot long snakes, alley cats, dogs, bats...loved them all. My one clear memory of an Ontario provincial fair I attended as a pre-schooler is kissing the stomach of a Clydesdale draft horse because it was the only part I could reach. But insects and worms were the bane of my existence; I ruined several summer lake outings for my parents because the dragonflies had me in inarticulate panic. Realizing that domestic animals get intestinal worms was the main reason that as a pre-teenager I decided NOT to be a veterinarian!

Over the years, my fear response abated, but a visceral aversion remained. Until we got the house in Ukiah and there was no way to avoid creepy crawlers. I got to be as casual around them as I'd always been (like any true New Yorker) around cockroaches.

But it took composting and gardening to get me to LIKE worms. Our clay soil has drainage problems, but man is it fertile and full of earthworms. Stu was shocked the day, about five years ago, I came in from digging around to put in some native plants, cheerfully announcing "hey, we got a lot of worms out there!" Our compost is chock full of red compost worms, hooray! And the areas of ground where birds let the sunflower and niger seed hulls fall are becoming miniature compost heaps also, full of healthy squirmy red worms.

So here I go, happily picking up handsful of seed hulls, mud, and red wigglies to relocate them in my half wine barrels. My strategy is to do some direct "lasagne gardening" in the barrels to nourish the soil. I'd already added lots of coffee grounds from our local roaster, and now I've inoculated them with this compost mix; the next step will be to start adding small amounts of our compostables to the barrels during the next month so it will be broken down by planting season. This will also give our current compost pile a chance to turn into usable compost.

The photo: I was visiting a client today way out on highway 20 about halfway to the Lake County line. Between the time I arrived at her home and the time I left, a neighbor had tethered this calf to the fence along their common driveway. I drove to Petaluma on Sunday and there were lots of tiny calves plus wild mustard, wild radish, and purple lupines were all in full bloom.