A Reptilian Index of Doing Right by the Earth

    As I develop our gardens, including our prairie gardens, one of my goals is to restore a full and rich biodiversity to the land. I want a rich and active set of life forms in the soil and on the soil. Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis talk about the soil food web in their book Teaming with Microbes, referring to the panoply of organisms from bacteria to nematodes and protozoa to spiders and soil mites to beetles, earthworms and moles.

   Bacteria are incredibly and invisibly small: the authors said that a quarter-million of them would fit into a period on the printed page; that a teaspoon of rich garden soil would contain a billion bacteria along with several yards of fungal strands, several thousand protozoa and several dozen nematodes. The latter are near-microscopic, hairlike roundworms (their name comes from the Greek nema meaning "thread"), some of which feed on plant matter, others are predatory on other small soil animals. And then there are the burying beetles, earthworms, moles and chipmunks. 

   All of these critters help mineralize the nutrients contained in the bodies of organic matter and living bacteria and protozoa: that is, they consume the organic matter and living organisms and then excrete the material in broken-down forms that include the pure (mineralized) nutrients that can be absorbed by living plants. The earthworms and beetles, etc. pull leaf litter down into the soil and break it down into degraded forms which then can be fed upon by bacteria, fungi and nematodes and other organisms.

    This kind of soil is what I am striving for with a rotational diversity of crops, green manure crops, composting, and mulching. Kitchen waste is composted or buried directly in the soil of garden beds to decompose. Next year I expect to have chickens whose composted litter (wood shavings, urine, and fecal droppings) I expect to add to the garden soil. And part of the time I will run the chickens in the garden to add their wastes directly to the soil.

    I've thought several times about having a hive of honeybees, but I prefer to encourage native bees.  They are more important and also many times more efficient pollinators. The advantage of European honeybees is simply that they are live in large colonies: there are just so many more of them. But we need the native pollinators. So I grow not only vegetable gardens, but also prairie gardens with a variety of flowers and grasses that bloom at different times through the year. We have also planted fruit trees, we have a half-dozen crab apple trees that came with the property (which were just loaded with apples this year), and we have planted native wildlife plants around the property. Our cultivated area is surrounded by young to early middle-aged forest which provides nesting places for the bees.  But I'm thinking that I need to put up some bee houses for the native bees. A project for this winter, I think.

    So I'm striving for biodiversity in plants, soil enriched in organic matter, and hoping this leads to a richer diversity in animal life. One index of some progress is the number of snakes we observe. The last several years we have seen an abundance of garter snakes in various sizes, from small to some quite large. A year ago I watched as one snake slowly swallowed a large toad: it's truly amazing how widely they can stretch their mouths.

    And this year I several times found small, pencil-sized red-belly snakes (kind of greenish-brown above). As I was harvesting potatoes in the south garden, I found two of them under the straw mulch around the potatoes. And a couple years ago I found a pine snake caught in some hardware cloth around the south garden. Unfortunately it was dead; I felt really badly about that. But I know they are around. In fact, they used to gather for the winter in an old well on the property before we bought it. Sadly, a condition of sale required by the county was that the well had to be filled with sand and a concrete cover placed over it.

    But if the snakes are any indication, we are making some progress toward biodiversity. Certainly replacing large expanses of lawn with vegetable and prairie gardens and berry patches and the planting of wildlife shrubs must greatly increase the available diversity.