Profile — WILD, WIGGLY WORMS

Posted in People on May 21 2008, by Plant Talk

Every few weeks an employee or friend of the Garden takes a quick stroll around the lush 250-acre grounds and writes down his or her thoughts. This week, Annie Novak, coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program at The New York Botanical Garden, took time to discuss one of her ickier interests: worms!

Young gardeners visiting the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden during the first warm weeks of spring are often delighted by the return of the red-breasted American robin. Watching the birds hop from plot to plot early this morning, I was reminded of another, more secretive, Garden inhabitant, whom we only see when we turn the earth with our trowels. If an acre of land is said to contain about a million worms, we can hardly start our gardening season without acknowledging the invaluable work red wrigglers and earthworms contribute to our healthy beds. Thanks to their digging and digesting, the soil turns loose and dark in our hands as we put seeds into the earth. Without worms to help us break down our lunch scraps, we wouldn’t have the rich dirt in which to grow more lunch!

The natural enthusiasm of our hard-working worms is matched above ground both by our visitors at the worm pit and our helminthology expert, Dave Goldberg. A Howell Family Garden volunteer, Dave built and maintains our Worm Bin, a hotel facility of sorts for his healthy red wrigglers. During “Wild, Wiggly, Worms” (through June 1), Dave converts many “Ewws!” into “Awesome!” with his kind, careful approach to introducing visitors to our subterranean helpers. Whether sifting through barrels of fresh, crumbling castings, or chatting with Dave about his ecological ideas about gardening, kids and their parents seem as eager as our robins to look for worms. If you’re lucky, you’ll see your first baby worm! Usually a visit with Dave ends with a handshake and a bag of high-quality worm poop. And although the Family Garden offers a number of worm-related activities, including making a bookmark for bookworms, the most popular is, as always, digging for—you guessed it—worms.

Come visit us throughout the month of May to learn how worms and kids of all ages can help save our planet Mother Earth. To catch Dave, be sure to arrive early during public hours. You know what they say about the early bird!