It Came From Beneath the Earth

Today, I was a husband. Well, I guess technically, the term is 'husbandman'. The definition is "one whose business it is to cultivate the ground. It was one of the first occupations, and was esteemed most honourable ." I'm probably still stretching it a bit, because I wasn't really 'cultivating the ground', I was gardening. Pulling weeds, digging, clipping dead leaves/flowers, feeding the plants, and spreading mulch is more like it. My husband was a husbandman, too. We didn't realize how old we are until at the end of the day, we could hardly move.

Anyhow, one of the things I dislike the most about gardening is worms. I don't like to see them, touch them, or even imagine them crawling around in the ground as I'm digging. I recently read an article about the Jamestown settlement, which said that originally, there were no earthworms in North America, and they likely arrived with the Jamestown colonists, who dumped ballast (European dirt and rocks) from their ships to make room for their tobacco exports. Over the centuries, the little buggers have multiplied and drastically altered the ecosystem.

The colonists brought honeybees, too. The fussy 'American' bees would only pollinate a few species of plants, but European honeybees, it seems, would pollinate anything. While the colonists brought the bees for their honey, the plants they brought with them wouldn't have proliferated without them, and Georgia probably wouldn't be called the Peach State.

Funny how little things can worm their way in unnoticed, but given a chance to grow, can change a whole landscape.