Affirm the worm and other great soil toilers
AFRIEND, Derek du Plessis, lives at the Waterfall Hills Estate between Sandton and Midrand. It is much favoured by retirees.
It’s not one of those retirement places where the cart goes round at dawn calling: “Bring out your dead!”
It’s very much a place for the fairly well-off, aged 50 onwards, who are tired of urban life and of the dawn chorus of ambulance sirens along the main roads.
Waterfall Hills describes itself as an “eco-friendly estate” and, as this year is The International Year of the Soil, it is making a special effort.
In our highly erodible country, the annual soil loss has reached disastrous proportions yet SOS – Saving Our Soil (if I can offer a slogan) – is something few think about.
I remember in the 1970s, Mangosuthu Buthelezi asking TC Robertson, a Zuluspeaking ecologist, where he thought the future Zulu capital should be. TC said: “Between Durban and Madagascar – that’s where your soil is ending up.”
As part of Waterfall’s soil campaign it has established a giant wormery.
A wormery is normally a large container in which worms are bred – fed on kitchen waste, etc – for use as fishing bait. Nowadays, gardeners are turning to them as a means of producing rich soil for the garden.
I have a wormery in full production outside my kitchen door. It contains huge knots of worms like living vermicelli or seviyen.
My worms love avocado skin and practically come running up when I dump one in the box. Eggshells too.
My three-tier wormery has had people coming from as far away as next door to stand in awe.
The bottom container collects liquid that filters down when I water the waste in the top container. This is used on my vegetables (not my cooked vegetables, you understand, but those growing in the garden).
The middle container is the soil made by the last generation of worms. It filters the water and is so rich that if I stick a seedling into it, I have to leap backwards.
The top box contains the waste and the worms.
I see Waterfall Hills prepares bokashi, a type of bran, which is layered with food waste in air-tight bins “so that it ferments and does not rot and therefore there will be no foul odours”.
I just sommer chuck in waste. A loosefitting lid lies on top. There’s no smell at all. The soil the worms produce looks good enough to spread straight on to bread.
Waterfall Hills speaks of its “red wigglers” producing “vermicast full of amino acids, beneficial micro-organisms, carbon and other essential micronutrients” which sounds like something homeopaths sell to slimming ladies at R200 a carton.
More and more people, from Mumbai to Benoni and San Francisco, are going into “natural” gardening – even on rooftops and vacant sites – and know the value of good soil.
Val Payn, who lives on her family farm in Harding, has just published (via Kindle) a delightful and instructive book for people who want to enrich their soil and get away from chemically overdosed and often overwatered gardens.
It’s called An Ecological Gardener’s Handbook.
Val (vallieb@gmail.com) is a professional landscape designer, lecturer and horticultural journalist who, at 45, went back to university (Stellenbosch) to read for a Master’s degree in sustainable development planning. There she became engrossed in designing productive gardens – with nature.
As she says, nature, after all, has been growing plants for ages without help from chemical arsenals.
Joy Haines of Morningside tells me she heard the first Piet my Vrou (redchested cuckoo) at 8.25am on Saturday morning. This is an all-time record for Gauteng.