Earthworms ... it is how?

[Grelinette]

Hello,

I open this new topic separately so as not to add more on the topics related to Did's "Lazy garden", already very active and rich in comments.

Here are the facts:

This summer I installed automatic watering systems on 2 large properties in Bouches du Rhône (commune of Aix en Pce). The houses had just been built and the soil in the garden was not only very clayey (soil supplied by large trucks), but also compacted like concrete because of the drought and the construction equipment which made the earthwork and heavily packed the ground: the rare wild plants which had managed to grow were rickety and almost roasted, and the ground so hard that even by tapping violently with a pickaxe, the point did not enter the ground.
In some areas we had to do it several times with a large self-propelled slicer to manage to make the trenches of barely 20 cm for the garden hoses (the teeth of the blade of the slicer did not arrive get into the ground!).

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I was very skeptical about the result (the growth of plants, grass, in this clay soil), while the gardener who took care of the planting of the place was confident. While I was installing the sprinkler system, the gardener plowed about 15 to 20 cm deep with a micro-tractor. He had to iron the tractor several times over very hard areas.

Once the watering was operational, the gardener sowed a standard lawn with fertilizer, and I programmed, according to the gardener's recommendations, 4 waterings of 10 minutes per day: a very green lawn grew in less than one week !

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Certainly, with water everything grows, but I realized by making some modifications on sprinklers that in the space of a few days many earthworms were already there! ... despite the quality of this earth which seemed to me not very arable, clayey and so hard.

It is probable that all these earthworms had found refuge more than 50 cm deep under this clay crust and the strong summer heat, and came up when the earth was plowed and then watered, but I was still very surprised to see the speed at which life returns to the soil, and with rather aggressive methods (adding soil, plowing, fertilizer, ...), so far from the gentle methods of the "Garden of the Sloth".

[chatelot16]

what happens to earthworms when the earth is too dry? nothing can live without water ... but maybe it will lay eggs, and that these eggs will make new glass of earth as soon as there is water ... so clay soil which seems right good to make bricks may already have what it takes to make worms as soon as you put water in them

[Did67]

Very interesting !

Well, we can grow grass on a carpet, irrigating and infusing (fertilizer) ...

Plants, especially grasses, don't need loose soil, as the photos I have shown here show.

message of 13/9/2016 at 14:10 p.m .: agriculture / gardening-more-than-bio-by-plant-live-without-fatigue-t13846-2100.html

Of two things one:

- either the worms were in diapause under the brought layer of soil (it depends on what there was before!)

- or they were brought with the soil brought if the developer had the delicacy of bringing back "topsoil"!

[Did67]

what happens to earthworms when the earth is too dry? nothing can live without water ... but maybe it will lay eggs, and that these eggs will make new glass of earth as soon as there is water ... so clay soil which seems right good to make bricks may already have what it takes to make worms as soon as you put water in them

They descend, where there is usually humidity. And curl into a ball and come to life slowed down ("diapause") ...

http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/ ... -zoologie/

[Grelinette]

Of two things one:

- either the worms were in diapause under the brought layer of soil (it depends on what there was before!)

- or they were brought with the soil brought if the developer had the delicacy of bringing back "topsoil"!

I think they went down deep because the soil brought was not very good: very clayey with hard blocks like rock and a lot of stones, bits of plastic, fragments of rubble and other waste, probably from a digging site for a swimming pool. Like what, even on bad bases, life starts again!

This is another subject, but in a gutter that I have at home and that collects the alluvium after each rain, when I clean it and the vacuum of the earth that has run off, I find earthworms of impressive size: more than 1 cm in diameter for easily 70 cm long, real monsters, they look like snakes so they are huge and even my chickens who follow me as soon as I work the land, do not attack it because they do not can't swallow them!
We finally have rain today and I will clean the gutter in a few days, I will post photos.

Edit: I thought my earthworms were already huge, but obviously there are even bigger on the net !

[Did67]

Edit: I thought my earthworms were already huge, but obviously there are even bigger on the net !

It's a kind of "giant" anecic that Marcel Bouché talks about.

They were decimated in the north (well, I do not know any more, from Valence or Lyon) during the last glaciations and have never recovered the lost space until today! This proves, by the way, that anecics move very slowly horizontally ...

You can send some to kna who is sorry not to have ...

[Grelinette]

Here is a short interesting page on the classification of earthworms: http://www.lombritek.com/?page=classement_zoologique_des_vers_de_terre

[Did67]

Yes.

To my knowledge, the "anecics" are not always of "brown color" ... It might be necessary to qualify a little.

I like to separate the epigees from the anecics, because that has nothing to do with it. Neither of the point "biological organization" of the worm (the anecic alone are "post-gizzards", therefore a work force superior to the others), nor of the role point in a garden ...

Finally, I don't like the term "plowman" either, since I find plowing negative! I prefer "tunnel boring machine". And we should above all speak of "soil engineers"!

[dede2002]

You mean the endogans?

The epigés are apparently marketable, is that perhaps why they are classified separately?

[Did67]

Yes, I meant "endogés", which the article cited groups together with the anecics, but, for the gardener, it is not at all the same ...

There, in fact, the site is a site for marketing "overhead" worms, used in vermicomposting. They are of no interest in the garden (except to persist in vermicomposting, thus dissipating the energy that would be useful to anecics!). Suddenly, in fact, they highlight the epigees, and mix the rest even if it has nothing to do with it. It is not a site which is interested "in the life of the ground"!