Worm poop

Yea worms! I have 250 scheduled for delivery next week. Bought them online of course. Only the best, Red Wrigglers, from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm. Worm poop is good stuff.

You see, a worm will excrete his/her...

(wait, are there “she” and “he” worms? Let me check, wait a minute...)

Nope, they are hermaphrodites. Apparently they can fertilize themselves but prefer to mate with another. Wow! I'm even more impressed. Some sort of unattainable holy grail for the male of the human species. If a woman is around, great; if not, not worries, I'll just do myself. Is it weird to wonder what it's like for worms to make love? :-)

Back to poop. Worms excrete their body weight each and every day. And their “castings”, as they are euphemistically called, are the most amazing, nitrogen rich, enzyme and mineral impregnated, free natural fertilizer in existence. And more. Worms un-compact the soil, aerate it, and their little tunnels become effortless pathways for deep plant roots.

I feel a bit un-sustainable arranging for my new worm friends to board on a plane in Pennsylvania--but the price is great, quality guaranteed, and my soil is SO BAD in many days of “double-digging” I have encountered one solitary, emaciated, lonely worm. I will repent my ways after I've gotten all the beds dug and find local worms, on my bicycle (no fossil fuels involved), I promise.

Double digging? Will speak of this more in future. It evolved from French intensive bio-dynamic gardening and has become the present day independent organic gardener's magna carta . As you sit at whole foods sipping your organic green tea (yes, it also hopped a plane in, this time from China), and as an aside mention to your table mate you are starting an organic garden, if they are in cult the retort will be “You double-dig”? Only acceptable answer “Of course!” (advise not having the word “rototiller” in your vocab).

You see, the founding concept of organic gardening is “feed the soil”. If you have rich, light, aerated, ph balanced, microorganism rich, mulched, composted soil (not dirt, soil) the seeds WILL grow, WILL flourish and flower, WILL express their innate divine, creative power, WILL bear amazing, nurturing fruit—and the weeds and pests WILL cooperate and adjust themselves to a balanced co-creative eco-system. No agent orange required.

Now as I am sweating breath heaving double-digging in the hot sun ordering worms online during green tea breaks, I am actually thinking most of the time how all this is transforming ME. Well, I think about myself most the time, but I feel this joy in all of this. And begin again to forget myself. And others feel it in me, and feel it in this newborn garden (not even a plant yet).

In the last three days we (me and my partner Lisa and her son) have had more unexpected visitors (most whom we have never met) who appear and immediately launch into dream-laden, fun personal conversations with us standing in our future garden area , than we have had since we moved into the house. (“If you build it, they will come.”)

I relate soil to heart. That's how I spend my days in the garden, really, thinking about these kind of things. We all have this amazing innate heart power. In India, they have a word for it, “shraddha”. A great teacher defined shraddha as “the energetic tendency of the heart's natural love”. The idea is if you remove the obstacles to that magnetic, joyful love (reactive emotions, unfilled yearnings, resentments, fears), and “feed the soil” so to speak--in the subsequent calm and peace you WILL experience, not a void, but a deep, almost overwhelming, spring-fed flood of your own natural love.

As I feed the soil, I feed my heart.

michael, from a barefoot garden