My Grandfather's Earthworm Farm

Here's a great story about an earthworm farm--oh, and they happened to raise, chickens, cows, goats, pigs, corn, fruit, and more.

My Grandfather's Earthworm Farm

How's this for a springtime farm ritual?

"When spring arrived, the season of the annual ploughing, the top layer of the heap would be stripped back, revealing the perfect work of the worms. What had originally been an ill-smelling mixture of manure, urine, and litter, was now a dark, fertile, crumbly soil, with the odour of fresh-turned earth. This material was not handled with forks, but with shovels. There were no dense cakes of burned, half-decomposed manure. My grandfather would take a handful of the material and smell it before pronouncing it ready for the fields. The 'smell test' was a sure way of judging the quality. When perfect transformation had taken place, all odour of manure had disappeared and the material had the clean smell of new earth."