EARTHWORMS IN GENERAL FARMING 71 



greatest advantage in their life-work of converting compost to 

 humus. 



Within a few months the earthworms had completed their 

 work. When spring arrived, the season of the annual plowing, 

 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 odor 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 of it 

 before pronouncing it ready for the fields. The "smell test" 

 was a sure way of judging the quality. When perfect trans- 

 formation had taken place, all odor of manure had disappeared 

 and the material had the clean smell of new earth. 



At this time of the year, the beginning of the spring plow- 

 ing, the compost heap was almost a solid mass of earthworms 

 and every shovel of material would contain scores of them. As 

 I now know from years of study and experiment, every cubic 

 foot of this material contained hundreds and hundreds of earth- 

 worm egg-capsules, each of which, within two or three weeks 

 after burial in the fields, would hatch out from two or three to 

 as high as twenty worms. Thus the newly hatched earthworms 

 became the permanent population of the soil, following their 

 life-work of digesting the organic material, mixing and com- 

 bining it with much earth in the process, and depositing it in 

 and on the surface as castings a finely conditioned, homo- 

 genized soil, rich in the stored and available elements of plant 

 food in water-soluble form. 



When the spring plowing began, the following method was 

 adopted: Several teams were used with the plows, while two or 

 three farm wagons with deep beds were employed in hauling 

 the crumbly end-product of the earthworms from the compost 

 pit to the fields. The wagons worked ahead of the plows, the 

 material being spread generously on the surface and quickly 



