The little green patch on my terrace

I have always been a fan of gardening. As a kid, I would imagine myself wearing fancy bright yellow gloves, with a small shovel in hand, digging the earth to plant parsley and tomatoes. I imagined finding an intricate nest of ants and a wiggling army of earthworms. I had no plans of evacuating them. I would let them live in harmony with my little saplings. Vermicompost - the art of using earthworms to aerate the soil and add manure to the soil be aiding the decomposition of leaf litters. The day our teacher taught us that vermicompost helps in making the soil naturally fertile, I started my "Worm-expedition". With a shovel in hand, a glass jar and a stick, I started digging my backyard soil. To my utter surprise and disappointment, I had only found a couple of sick, thin and malnourished earthworms. What hadn't occurred to me then was that earthworms thrive well in moist soil and our backyard soil was dry and cracking. However, no power in the world can extinguish the heart of a 7-year-old. I had collected them in the jar, carefully picking them up with the stick and had sealed the lid which had about twenty holes punctured in it.
I let opened the lid slowly to release the worms into my potted plants. One for each of my sapling. After being puzzled for about five minutes, the worms wiggled into the earth with ease. I could see their tails vanishing into the narrow tunnel and I felt like a proud parent.
Probing and poking of the soil began the next day. I used to wait for hours staring at the