The presence of a healthy population of earthworms in a garden’s soil works very effectively to protect plant leaves from being eaten by slugs, new research from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna has found.

Even though the earthworms don’t have direct contact with the slugs or the plant growth above, they seem to very effectively protect the plants via increased nitrogen content in the plants, as a result of the earthworms being present. The researchers also found that with increased plant diversity the amount of damage that the slugs did to individual plants was greatly lessened.
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