ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 17, 1997 TAG: 9702170005
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: LAURA MOYER THE (FREDERICKSBURG) FREE LANCE-STAR
WHAT'S A GARDENER to do in the dormant days of winter? Teri Merl turns her attention to worms - and reaps the benefits the rest of the year.
Those dark, wet weeks between the last mum and the first crocus can be a dreary time for a gardener.
The days are short. The ground is hard. At times it's so cold you could freeze an egg on the sidewalk.
But even when winter is at its sleety worst, Teri Merl of southern Stafford County is not to be found huddled under a blanket, paging plaintively through seed catalogs or dreaming of daffodils.
More likely, she is tending to her worms. They live in a 20-gallon bucket in her basement and produce a substance called ``worm castings'' (or worm dung).
``Black gold,'' Merl calls it. Put a little in some potting soil, and house plants or vegetable seedlings practically squirm with joy.
Raising worms for their black gold is called vermicomposting. And Merl, a professional garden planner, is passionate about it.
In fact, Merl, 38, is passionate about everything to do with plants and gardening, and has been since she was a girl growing up in Silver Spring, Md.
She'd watch and help as her parents, James and Willie Speight, worked magic with roses and cockscomb and four-o'clocks and marigolds. But as a young adult, Merl relegated gardening to a minor hobby.
She majored in fashion merchandising in college, married, had her first daughter and worked for several years as a legal secretary and office manager in Washington.
When her second daughter was born, Merl stayed home and worked as a full-time seamstress.
Always, even when the family lived in apartments or townhouses, Merl kept a balcony garden of tomatoes or peppers or okra.
Eventually, she and her husband, Timothy, reached a turning point. Seeking an easier commute for Timothy and a less hassle for the rest of the family, the Merls moved to Stafford two years ago.
At last, Teri Merl had a yard of her own to dig in. But almost as soon as the Merls moved in, neighbors warned Teri that nothing had ever grown in that shaded, moist backyard, and nothing ever would.
Undaunted, she had three trees removed, worked to improve the soil and planted a vegetable garden that eventually startled even her with its variety and abundance.
And she signed up for the master gardener class offered by the state Cooperative Extension office. And that's how she became a friend to worms.
It's a requirement of the master gardener class that students complete a certain number of volunteer hours, putting their gardening knowledge to work for the public good.
One afternoon, Merl was answering phones in the extension office when someone mentioned that Drew Middle School needed a master gardener to tell students about composting and worms.
The assignment appealed to Merl. She drove to Richmond to purchase buy red wrigglers, small red worms that are prodigious eaters and black-gold producers.
She and her daughters - Teri is now 13, and Thea is 8 - created the ideal bucket environment for the wrigglers, which must be kept between 55 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
They put the worms on a bed of fallen leaves and covered them with more leaves, shredded newspaper and leftover kitchen vegetables. They moistened the mixture and covered it with cardboard.
The worms wormed their way through several feedings, black-golding by the bucketful and reproducing. The original population of 40 has grown to several hundred, Merl said.
And Merl now makes her worm-and-composting lecture available to any school with an interest. She has involved her own girls in vegetable and flower gardening and is pleased that, for the most part, they've been receptive.
``It might be a little nerdy, but it's better than sitting in front of a boob tube, better than playing those hostile video games,'' she said.
In the summer, Merl can drop her husband off at the train station at 5:30 a.m., be in her own garden by 6, and not come in again until after dark.
But not everything needs to wait until summer. One recent afternoon, the sun broke through gray clouds and provided a brief respite in the winter misery.
Merl seized the moment. She went outside, turned her two large outdoor compost piles and made an immensely satisfying discovery - ``oodles and oodles of big, fat worms.''
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Teri Merl, a professional garden planner inby CNBStafford County, fertilizes her own garden from a 20-gallon bucket
in her basement where she keeps her worms. color. 2. Teri Merl shows
off some of the worms from her bucket. She uses their dung as a
potent fertilizer for her garden.