2023-12-15 07:30:00
I removed tiles: sidewalk tiles measuring thirty by thirty. Some turned out to be one and a half times as thick. I can only think of one reason why someone would pave a garden path with tiles, some of which are thicker: they were still there and needed to be put on. For the person who removes them, in this case the undersigned, it means extra work.
Anyway. The tiles were laid so tightly that there was little greenery between them. I also encountered few wriggling, let alone crawling, animals. Only the occasional earthworm. The earthworms behaved lethargically. They looked dead, but they weren’t.
I kept interrupting my work to lift them up and take them to safety, and sometimes they made a half-hearted attempt to escape my fingers into the depths of the earth.
Leaves between the tiles
You wonder what those creatures under the tiles eat, drink and breathe. Well, that’s simple: dead leaves, water and air.
Air penetrates the soil, and the worms’ burrows help act as a ventilation system. Rainwater seeps through the cracks and in times of drought and summer heat, the soil under a tile cover does not quickly dry out. Moisture is also contained in the dead leaves that the worms eat. They pull them down between the tiles at night.
If those tiles have been laid professionally, there is not always enough space for them. Then in the morning you can see leaves standing upright, with their stem stuck between two tiles. Or between two vowels. A worm grabbed the leaf and dragged it along, it got stuck, or the worm was disturbed by an unwanted subject: a human or mole, for example, and left the leaf behind halfway through the operation.
Readers have sometimes asked me about those mysterious, upright leaves on the garden path. So earthworms.
In winter there is less to eat and their bodies are too cold to sprint. That is why worms allow themselves to be picked up lethargically.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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