Yesterday, I harvested my first yield. Rich, dark earth, soft in my hands. It had been in the making since June and was my trial effort. Several years before, I had participated in a workshop. We were divided into small groups, each one investigating some environmental question. The luck of the draw had me investigating a subject about which I had known little or nothing. While others examined climate change, forestry, or water pollution, I was stuck with soil erosion!

It wasn’t my chosen topic, but I soon learned that topsoil is a disappearing wealth. It is being used up eight times faster than it is being created naturally. Deforestation takes away one of its natural wind breaks. Without this protection, its destruction speeds up.

I am no farmer. However, soil and its dilemma took me unawares. In June, I purchased a Can O’Worms. It is top of the range, with three separate compartments that are built up gradually. A thousand worms came with the deal, and I have been feeding them my peels and kitchen waste ever since. For dessert, they are also happy to partake of cardboard and newspaper. With time, I have been able to build up my three layers, until I realised that the moment of reckoning was nigh.

Yesterday it happened. I removed the bottom layer to find the produce of my wiggly friends. I am not even a gardener, so the sensation of putting my hands into the cool, dark, damp earth was a new one. Somehow, it was strange but still familiar. There was a rightness, an at-home-ness about the action. I found I wasn’t a stranger after all.

In the clay, there still were traces of all that I had fed into that pile. Melon seeds, some prune stones, eggshells, even some of the cardboard that must have been that bit too tough to be broken down quickly. Seems that even worms leave a little on their plates. But, most of all, there was that nutritious, priceless material. Earth! We can praise the achievements of many a person and this can be well due to her or him. However, to forget the worth of the worm is to beggar ourselves forever.

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Suzanne Ryder rsm
Western Province