NATURE Wriggle room

Wriggle room


Country Sights and Sounds
John Shelley

I was gazing through the window at the sky; blue and grey, grey and blue, sunshine and showers, a breeze blowing up from the south-west. There would be a ripple the length of that river pool, where I had failed to catch that trout. I had seen him well enough. He had seen me too, that wise old fish, and had slunk away to his bolt-hole under the bank...
‘Oh no you don’t. There’s shopping to get.’ A list was thrust into my hand: Bread; Toilet roll; Something for lunch.
On my way to town I stopped to look over the bridge and found a small trout feeding in the pool above. Up and up again he came, to take a succession of newly hatched insects from the surface. An old and broken alder leaned its weathered boughs above the water to cast a faint shadow. If I stood at its root a clever cast would have that fish in a moment...
I tore myself away. Ten minutes later I pulled into the garden centre – another compulsory stop when we travel in this direction – to admire seed potatoes and onion sets and Look! A bargain corner with neglected fruit trees and a pair of long-handled secateurs with just a slight bend to one of the blades. And there, too, a water-stained and broken brown cardboard box marked at a fiver. I tore the corner to find an instruction book with an interesting title: ‘The Worm Works. Composting Food the Natural Way’, then rent it open to expose several layers of black plastic box with legs and a lid – a sort of multi-story, high-rise home for earthworms, wherein the inhabitants turn food waste into compost.
My very own worm farm! Just the thing to go under the kitchen counter. No more digging about in the garden and even enough worms to keep James happy. In my mind I was already casting my pets-to-be at summer trout in thread-thin water. Filled with happy thoughts my hands were busy doing their own thing and by the time the kindly sales assistant arrived on the scene I had the contents of the box half assembled.
“Were you going to buy that, Sir?” The expression was kindly indeed, but the voice, I thought, was unnecessarily stern.
Together we gathered my half-built wormery and the few scattered parts that remained at my feet and carried the lot to the checkout.
My wife was in the garden. I had time to clear out under the worktop and get this thing up and running. Those spare tiles could go somewhere else, as could the potatoes; the resulting space was perfectly sized and within minutes I had my new project installed. And just in time, too.
The door opened wide and in strode The Boss. “You were gone a while. What did you get for lunch?”
Oh bother. Lunch. “Hello dear, just tidying up a bit…” a hopelessly inept attempt at changing the subject.
“You didn’t get anything, did you? And what ARE you doing down there?” She caught sight of my new acquisition and I waited for the inevitable. “A worm farm! You got me a worm farm! How did you know that was what I wanted?”
I sensed escape. “I thought it might save money” – on bait, I thought, then, remembering the forgotten toilet roll – “on food for your koi.”
Inside the box we found a card inviting us to send off for a few worms, which would be sent free of charge from Dromore in County Down, to get the worm farm up and running. “I’ll post it now,” I said, “while I go for the shopping.”
James was there when the worms arrived in a foot-square box and studied them with the eye of the keen bait-fisher. He held two by their heads and examined them closely, turning them this way and that.
“So how do you know what they are?”
“They’re Dendrobena – the best trout worms of all.”
“No, I mean what are they – males or females? How can you tell?”
“They’re neither. Well, actually they’re both.”
“What do you mean? How do they...?” he paused uncertainly.
I tried to explain. “They’re hermaphrodite – boy and girl together both.”
“You mean…” James looked appalled, dropped the worms back into the compost and watched them burrow out of sight with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. “Lordee me! They’ll have that carry-on on the telly next. Its a wonder it’s not on Fair City already.” He paused. “I could make a fortune.”
Since then our worms have grown fat and sleek and have begun to exercise their hermaphroditic talents, creating such a surplus that some must surely be allowed to the river, where they can start to pay their way.