Worms are generally a good sign

A Gardener’s Diary

I suppose that introducing the subject of worms just after breakfast on a Sunday morning is not quite the done thing, but the interesting thing is that they are very garden friendly.  Not, however, lawn friendly, and especially not friendly to groundsmen who are responsible for the care and maintenance of cricket pitches, and especially the square.

John Warrington
John Warrington

In the early part of the sixties I spent a great deal of time living in a part of London called St   John’s Wood, which just happened to be the district where the Marylebone cricket club ground is to be found.  Those of you who follow that most beautiful of all games will know that Lords Cricket ground is the home of cricket, and it was my good fortune to come to know the head groundsman there. We used to talk for hours about his work, and his views on worms were always revealing, and as soon as the tell-tale castes appeared his staff were out there getting rid of them.  He used to say that worms were all very well if you were growing maize, rice, wheat, barley and nearly all other members of the grass family, but no good at all on a cricket ground like Lords or Providence.

To the ‘ordinary’ gardener if there is such a thing as worms they are generally a good sign, except when they are found in pot plants.  There they are a great nuisance because they clog up the drainage.   I have seen birds waiting for worms to emerge in the early morning and then taking them for their breakfast.   In the lawn birds have a feast on most mornings, but otherwise worms are continually recycling soil from deeper in the ground and then getting rid of it at the surface.   All you really need to do is to sweep the castes so that the soil is distributed more or less evenly.

Guyana because of its situation near to the Amazon is one of the most fortunate countries on the face of this planet. There are countless millions of trees all giving off oxygen and consuming countless tons of carbon dioxide.  Quite by accident the rest of the world owes us a great deal, and seems hell bent on squandering it.  Now that Christmas is approaching I always think of people in Britain growing Christmas trees, and of one firm in England which grows one-and-a-half million for marketing each December.  It has been calculated that growing 40 million Christmas trees a year uses 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and in doing so they produce a great surplus of oxygen.  On the rare visits when I flew to the Pakaraimas I passed over billions of trees which are all using billions of tons of CO2 and giving off oxygen for us to breathe. All we need to do to ensure our survival is to make sure that irresponsible cutting does not occur. We need to adopt a responsible attitude to make sure that our own city and rural environment are taken care of for the sake of our children and the generations that come after us.   May the great God take care of you all and the millions of trees in our care.