Rex Trulove
Healthy yard and garden soil is dirt that has lots of organic material and it is a thriving community of bacteria and yeasts. While people often don’t think of bacteria as being healthy, they are needed to break down organic material so it can be used by plants. If none of the bacteria is present, the dirt will be sterile and it will be hard to get grass, flowers, vegetables or fruits to grow. Bacteria are hard to see without a powerful microscope, though, so to tell how healthy the soil is, we must look for other organisms that eat the bacteria and yeast.
There are a number of tiny insects that devour bacteria, but again, they are hard to see. Still, there are other invertebrates that consume both bacteria and yeast, and which are quite easy to see, such as Earthworms.
If the ground is healthy, you should be able to turn over a shovelful of dirt, when it is moist and warm and should see a number of earthworms. Earthworms not only eat bacteria and yeast, as well as other tiny organisms, they help fertilize the yard and garden because what goes into the mouth end comes out the other end as broken down and highly enriched fertilizer. While doing this, the worms also are burrowing, which aerates the soil.
New gardeners are often surprised to learn that most plant roots require not only moisture and minerals in the dirt, they also need air in the dirt to survive. That is one of the problems of clay soil. Clay soil tends to compact so much and the dirt particles are so small that there isn’t a lot of air in the soil. There also aren’t many earthworms in clay soil, usually.
So what can you do if there aren’t very many worms? You can enrich the soil by adding finished compost, used coffee grounds, stale coffee, stale beer, tea, pulverized vegetable trimmings (such as those that have been run through a blender or food processor with a little water added) and in the case of a yard, you can use a mower that has a mulching blade rather than a bag attachment and regular blade.
The pulverized material, stale coffee, tea and stale beer break down readily and quickly, giving helpful bacteria an almost immediate boost. When healthy bacteria have plenty to eat, they multiply rapidly. The mulching blade crushes the grass as you mow, leaving it in the yard to break down rapidly and feed the healthful organisms.
It isn’t at all hard to tell if your soil is healthy. Simply look for worms. Large numbers of worms is a good sign that the dirt is healthy. There are ways you can make the soil even healthier, but among the best is to add organic material. Of course, the time to look for the worms is during the growing season, when the soil is warm enough that the worms can survive near the surface. In the winter, night crawlers have been known to burrow down six feet or more, in order to survive.
Still, wormy soil is almost always healthy soil.
