When Devlin is not putting pen to paper she indulges in her other passion, gardening. She is dedicated to organics and recycling — key features of her personal gardening philosophy, which extends to keeping worms. Tiger worms, to be precise.
Devlin says: “I’m not generally what you’d call creature friendly. Snails give me the heeby-jeebies, and the various bugs that scuttle about my garden with a tasteless excess of legs are barely tolerated. But I am developing a relationship with worms.
“Not just any old worms. These are composting worms and they live in a bin in my back garden called a wormery. We have an understanding: I give them my household waste and they give me high-octane fertiliser. I’m using it to repair the damage to various pot plants after moving house.
“This worm goo is really the business when it comes to persuading droopy plants to rally and throw out the odd flower. And it’s organic. I’d nearly abandoned hope for a princess lily, between the snails feasting on her and the trauma of moving, but the worm castings have given them the kiss of life. I also have a fondness for geraniums and the worm castings have turned several scrappy rejects into a blaze of salmon pink glory.
“Thanks to the worm goo, I’ve also successfully transplanted some lilies from my grandmother’s garden; she’s dead, unfortunately, but I love having this living connection with her. My grandfather earned his living as a gardener in Co Limerick and had a large plot of his own.
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“I particularly remember a sea of rhubarb — we were always picking the leaves and prancing about pretending they were parasols. The magnificent lilies were my granny’s pride and joy and I’m delighted to have some of them in my own seaside garden in south Co Dublin.”
It was a clampdown on household refuse that converted Devlin to the joys of vermiform gardening.
She says: “I’d been a bit uneasy about landfill sites, and had been trying to recycle as much glass, plastic and paper as possible. Then the council introduced pay-by-weight bin collections and I decided it was time to bring on the big guns — composting worms. I had a compost heap at my previous home but it took ages to break down refuse so I invested in some special worms to speed up the process.
“My lads are called tiger worms, which always makes me imagine they’re the predators of the creepy-crawly kingdom, boldly chomping leftovers spurned by other creatures. Basically I can feed them anything, from coffee grounds to pizza cartons, from eggshells to newspapers, and they’ll gobble it up.
“They are insatiable; they chomp half their bodyweight daily. They seem particularly fond — don’t laugh — of soggy jasmine teabags. Obviously I have a colony of bon viveurs in my garden. Then again, they also devour the contents of the vacuum cleaner — sturdy digestive systems, or what? But one week I gave them too much orange rind and we had a spot of vermiform tummy trouble.”
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Devlin calls them “the lads”, although technically they’re hermaphrodites. “They just seem quite laddish to me,” she says. “They’re partial to the warm weather and there’s been a lot of procreation going on since the sun started shining. There were about 1,000 of them when they arrived and within two to five years I can expect the colony to expand to 20,000.”
The wormery, which is a bin-sized drum, has four trays. At the bottom is a collecting tray with a tap where the worm castings are gathered. Tray two has coconut-hair bedding, which is where they live. Tray three is their canteen, where Devlin puts toilet-roll tubes and potato peelings. Tray four has more waste material.
“It’s really cut back my household waste and I feel wonderfully virtuous when I think of them.”
Her wormery, including the worms, cost €175 from the Grow Green Nurseries in Wicklow.
“I know you can buy some class of pedigree worm (a better breed of invertebrate?). And I find myself surfing the net to read up on the lads but I'm not sure what these fellows do that my tiger worms don’t. If they weed the garden for me I’ll definitely invest in them."
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Dermot O'Neill's articles are archived on his website, www.dermotoneill.com