Don’t be alarmed if you find a genial, blue-eyed Australian gentleman digging through the rubbish near your house or on the neighbourhood riverbank. David Lambert is researching Bali’s worms, a subject that has absorbed him for almost 25 years.
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I led two lives,” explains the enthusiastic vermiculturalist. “By day I was a technical director in TV. The rest of the time I was researching, breeding and selling worms.” He’s written a popular booklet called, “Earthworm Breeding for Profit,” which has sold about 10,000 copies.
David’s passion has a long and honourable past. Aristotle stated, “Earthworms are the intestines of the soil.” Charles Darwin was intrigued by them, and Cleopatra decreed that her subjects revere earthworms as sacred animals and not remove them from the earth.
I happen to share his affection for these innocuous crawlers. I remember when my first-grade teacher put her hand into my coat pocket in search of a handkerchief and encountered a knot of energetically wriggling earthworms I’d rescued from a wet sidewalk that morning. She didn’t happen to be a nature lover and the resulting screams caused a bit of a drama. My mother reports an indignant telephone call from the school to the effect that nicely brought up little girls did not conceal earthworms in their pockets. My mother allowed that this was probably true. But she already knew that I would rather sit in a ditch watching bugs than in the house watching television.
This, of course, was long before I understood how beneficial the creatures are. Their role in conditioning the soil is so important that we might not be able to survive as a species without them.
They occur in two main groups. Composting worms provide an effective, low-tech solution to organic household waste, which accounts for up to 80% of Bali’s garbage. A simple, inexpensive system for half a kilo of red worms will consume two kilos of kitchen scraps a week and in return produce richly fertile worm castings and ‘juice’. One friend who has been jealously guarding her bin of red Tiger worms for over three years has been known to gift her closest friends with old Aqua bottles full of worm urine for their gardens. It’s a funny little town, Ubud.
Earthworking worms, which are normally bigger than composters, are the ones you find when digging in the garden. They aerate, irrigate and fertilize the soil, turning fallen leaves and other refuse into food for living plants. A good population of earthworms can improve water penetration by 500%, which could be the margin that allows previously infertile soil to become productive farmland.
Worms produce their own weight in castings every day, a product which is highly valued by gardeners. Castings contain seven times as much nitrogen as the surrounding soil and three times as much potassium. A recent experiment in California found that tomato plants growing in a medium with worms and worm castings produced 33% more fruit than those without.
Passionate worm breeders claim that their product can be sold to fishermen, fish and bird breeders, orchardists, landscape gardeners, sewage processing plants, nurseries and householders. But most hobbyists keep a bin or two to recycle kitchen scraps and provide a little fertilizer.
Among the most ancient of terrestrial creatures, worms have been around for several hundred million years. North Americans will be deeply interested to learn that the last Ice Age wiped out any native species in Canada and the northern United States. The current residents were brought with potted plants from Europe. There are over 2,000 species of what we call worms, ranging from a couple of centimeters long to an alleged three metres. Worms are simple creatures. There’s a mouth at one end and an anus at the other, with 90-150 muscular segments and five hearts in between. Organic waste goes in one end, and fertilizer comes out the other. What beautiful engineering.
Composting worms have interesting and active sex lives. A cleric in Darwin’s time noted disapprovingly that night crawlers seemed to spend most of their time making worm whoopee. Instead of having 2 sexes, like humans and papaya trees, they are all bisexual. When sexually mature, a swollen band appears about a third of the way between the head and tail. After that, it is just food and sex, sex and food for the rest of their lives. Eight worms can produce about 1500 young within 6 months.
Advocates of alternative protein sources insist that worms could be a solution to malnutrition in Africa. But David feels that eating them is a great waste of worms. “Yes, they are 70% protein when dried,” he agrees. “But they tend to concentrate heavy metals and perhaps pesticides so it’s probably not a sensible food for humans. Besides, they do more good producing fertile soil where people can grow more food.” I was relieved to hear it. My interests in vermiculture and gastronomy are distinctly separate.
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So what are you really looking for here in Bali?” I asked. “Indian Blues and African Night Crawlers,” he confessed. If you are harbouring these highly desirable creatures or would just like a good chin-wag about worms in general, you can contact David at david_lambert70@hotmail.com
