RE: Friendly worms or killer worms???

**"Jeff Ball" j*@starband.net**

thanks Mary for a great summary.

For the good of the order of garden writing, I think there is a deeper
professional issue here with the LA worm story.  Ros Creasy and I had a long
chat at the Chicago Garden Writer's meeting, and I'm pretty sure neither of
us had a beer in our hands; but then again.....  In any case, we were musing
about how it seemed that garden writers tended not to want to get into
controversial topics; just an opinion of course.  By controversial topics we
meant genetic engineering of plants, spreading of invasive species by
nurseries, phosphorous seepage into lakes and streams from lawn fertlizer,
evironmental impact of lawn care company's lawn care progrms, etc.
We both had been involved over the years trying to undo the damage of bad
writing by some garden writers bemoaning the use of Canadian sphagnum peat
moss because "it was not a renewalable resource".  Of course it is. The
European peat is what is not renewable. But that bad information hung on for
over ten years.

So here we have an issue - are earthworms really bad for the ecosystem?
Most folks, including most garden writers have no clue about the difference
between a night crawler and a red wiggler.  I suspect the article in the LA
newspaper was not written by a garden writer; no reason why it should be.
But here is my concern.  We garden writers are supposed to be writing about
how to create good soil "to attract earthworms".  We are supposed to
encourage recycling our kitchen waste on the property with "worm farms" of
some sort.  In Englad the garden writers encourage people to kill night
crawlers because they mess up the very short mowed lawns in that country.
Here we have a gazillion lawns most growing on compacted soils and one of
the solutions is to mulch the lawn to attract worms which will break up that
compaction and improve the quality of the turf and reduce the need for
pesticide. So are worms bad or are they not bad?

I remember the article some years ago about a study done in the parks around
New York City where it was pretty much confirmed that the leaf mulch was
gone because of earthworm activity; specifically night crawlers.

My question is whether research has confirmed that the earthworm's reduction
of the leaf mulch has been in any serious way harmful to the trees and
plants in the forest at hand?  Maybe the earthworms simply speed up the
process of getting food to the soil food chain, and the trees are just as
healthy as they were when the process of decomposing leaves into the soil
was slower.  I'm guessing that the impact on the health of the trees is low.
On the other hand, the leaf mold is habitat for beneficial bugs and snakes
and other creatures, and losing that habitat probably does have long range
negative impact on the health of the park or forest. But who has looked at
that? Probably no one.

So here is my rather undiferentiated concern.  I don't think garden writers
should jump on the band wagon of questionable data and keep the story about
how bad worms are for the environment of forests.  But they probably will.
I am of course not referring to any garden writer on this GWL, only those
others (grin).  If the story grows that earthworms are bad, and as Mary
points out, it is critical to know exactly which earthworms we are talking
about, our profession is spreading bad information.  Garden writers seem
comfortable with latin names of plants, but I wonder if they observe the
same rigor with the latin names of species of earthworms.

I can see another "peat moss" phenomenon developing here that can take
people like Mary ten to fifteen years to undo.

Earthworms may be imported exotic species.  But they have been here for over
300 years years.  they started out in New England and the forests of New
England are in fairly good shape considering their being washed with acid
rain for decades.  The worms have apparently not been a major player in the
health of the New England forests or we would probably have heard about it.

So how do we behave on this story as a profession?  Do we as a "profession"
try to make sure this story does not get out of control?  I have no clue.
All I know is that I feel that we should be doing something, but I don't
know what that something is. Maybe we have a "bad data alert" column in the
GWA Newsletter, or something.

How's that for a ramble?

Jeff Ball

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