Are you fond of gardening? Growing your own vegetables?
You might not enjoy any of those activities, but during your childhood you probably enjoyed digging a hole in the ground searching for buried treasure or even to see how deep you could dig.
How do I know this? You weren’t alone.
These squirmy little friends of ours are integral to the ground beneath us as they decompose organic material into soil which then work as nutrients for plants to feed off in order to grow naturally and successfully.
In a nutshell, for the growth of high quality crops we need earthworms. And growing your own food is a great way to be healthy. First Lady Michelle Obama agrees with me and even wrote a book about it.
As it so happens a 2016 study by scientists Christine van Capelle, Stefan Schrader and Salvatore Arpaia investigated different species of earthworms to determine which ones were the most helpful for the growth of crops, specifically corn and potato in Europe. Since Europe’s agriculture is so dense, they chose specific countries to encompass Europe’s corn and potato cultivation.
It’s for this reason they picked they picked Ireland, Spain and Sweden as they represent the Boreal, Atlantic and Mediterranean regions engulfing Europe.
So van Capelle, Schrader and Arpaia identified earthworms based on characteristics including as mentioned above: suitability to land, water or both land and water as well as population density, which in this case refers to how strongly populated a certain earthworm species might be in a given area of soil.
Based on these selection criteria, two species – Ap. Caliginosa and L Terrestris– were chosen as focal, or simply put, important species of earthworm required for the successful and natural growth of corn and potato in Europe.
As Aussies we ourselves love our thinly cut potato fries and our corn on the cob, so this is closer to home than you might think.
You read it here first, take the corn out of scorn and put the ta in potato and thank you very much!
You are now on your way to a healthy, organic diet.