On another thread when you said you didn't have earthworms but that you'd been dumping manure on an area for two years, I did figure you were going to find some earthworms in there somewhere.

Congrats on the worms! They'll help improve your soil so much.

I was cleaning up and moving pots, I guess I didn't go deep enough. I love my worms!!!

Ahhhh worms....Gods little rototillers....

My garden started as red, barren, overgrazed, hard hard hard clay. With 0 worms. I have amended like crazy and it is a good garden now. I still do not have as many worms as I would like to. But get more every year. I heard one time that a good worm ratio is to dig 1 big shovelful of dirt and there should be 7-12 worms. That seems like a lot to me. Growing up we would dig worms for bait in my Grandad's well manured cattle lots around the barns. It took more than a couple of shovelfuls to find enough worms.

Scott, I started out with soil just like yours. I didn't see any worms at all when we first broke up the ground. I doubt I saw a single earthworm that first spring, but I found one single worm in the ground when we were digging up near the house (where the clay was even worse than it was in the garden) to plant a tree. I was so excited to see that sole earthworm that I scooped it up and carried it to the garden, placing it in one of the few raised beds we built that first year, the one to which we already had added a lot of organic matter. After that, as the soil got better each year, the earthworm population grew.

One of the things I've done every year to attract more earthworms is to put down a layer of cardboard or newspaper on the ground, wet it down with the water hose and pile grass clippings, manure, and/or chopped/shredded leaves on top of it. For some reason, earthworms love cardboard and newspaper. They come to devour it and then improve the soil as they work their way through the cardboard newspaper and organic matter piled on top of it. Our earthworm population has grown slowly and steadily ever since. We've been here since 1999 and now our front garden is full of earthworms. The back garden doesn't have as many (and it started as sandy-silty soil were virtually no organic matter in it either), but it is only a few years old and it is getting better as we go along.

We'd been gardening here for probably 12-14 years before I saw my first snail. While gardeners generally don't celebrate finding snails or slugs in their garden, I was kind of happy to see it. I took the snail sighting as a sign that our soil had reached a really important milestone in terms of soil quality. Now we have lots of snails (but still no slugs, for which I am grateful) and I'm not happy to see them, but they serve as a reminder of how much the soil has improved and how far it has come.

The good thing about most clay soils (I've gardened in both red gumbo and black gumbo clay) is that they are high in minerals, so generally are nutrient-filled. And, those of us with clay don't have root knot nematodes like some folks have with very sandy soil. Once we get the clay well-amended with organic matter, it is great gardening soil.

This year my mulch on the garden beds and in the pathways has been filled with earthworms. I'm easily seeing ten times as many as I've ever found in late winter or early spring. It is hard to understand why. Maybe it was the extreme moisture we had last year. Maybe it drove earthworms from deeper in the soil up to the very upper layers. We did have all kinds of extreme flooding everywhere with water standing in pastures, bar ditches (and my garden pathways) for months without going away. Or, maybe it just made all the mulch so wet that earthworms came to it in droves to devour it. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to see so many earthworms.

Dawn