Worms provide another service in the garden. As they burrow, worms create channels through which water and air circulate. In a well-cultivated acre, worms can create six million of these channels. With heavy rain, however, these conduits can flood. As the weather clears, you may find worm refugees seeking higher ground on the soil surface or on sidewalks. You may even catch an odd gardener rescuing stranded worms before they succumb to dehydration or careless feet.
Roots, the parts of plants that grow in worm territory, are not elegant and showy like the top half of a plant. Roots provide plants with much more than just a static anchor. In fact, hidden from sight, they maintain a robust energetic life. Roots extend their length daily, clambering through the soil with great urgency. A black and white snap shot of a root tip looks like a car about to speed through a stop sign. A video shows the root’s power and determination to forge ahead over sharp particles and around stones to find nutrients dissolved in water.
Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis, authors of Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web describe a little-known function of roots.
“Most gardeners think of plants as only taking up nutrients through root systems and feeding the leaves. Few realize that a great deal of energy that results from photosynthesis in the leaves is actually used by the plants to produce chemicals they secrete through their roots. These secretions are known as exudates. A good analogy is perspiration ... Root exudates are in the form of carbohydrates ... and proteins. Amazingly, their presence wakes up, attracts, and grows specific beneficial bacteria and fungi living in the soil that subsist on these exudates and cellular material sloughed off as the plant’s root tip grows.”
A well-developed root system includes hundreds of feet of roots and root hairs. Adult rye plants, for example, have individual root systems that can total almost 400 miles in length.
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