Case Study: Bird and Bee Native Plants
Tobi Schulman launched the Bird and Bee Native Plants nursery in 2022, after two decades in the nursery industry. It was a project born out of Schulman’s intense desire to help restore healthy ecosystems with native plants and ecotypic seeds, no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers.
So it came as a gut punch late in late summer of her first year selling products when she realized she had jumping worms. And the worms weren’t just on her property, they were in her pots. “That was really emotionally devastating,” she says. “Suddenly there’s a good chance I sold plants before I realized I had the worms, and I’ve now potentially contaminated other people’s properties.”
At that point, two questions came into play: What to do about her products, and what to tell customers, if anything. Disclosing to customers felt more ethical, but also risked alienating consumers.
With support from the extension at the University of Vermont (UVM), and UVM jumping worm researchers, Josef Gorres and Maryam Nouri-Aiin, Schulman confirmed the species of her worms and began seeking out next best steps. She suspended her plant sales for the rest of the season—a decision she emphasizes as both extremely difficult and privileged, as the nursery was still a passion project and not her sole source of income at the time—she scouted everything in the nursery. There were worms present in much of the stock and she had to assume that everything was potentially contaminated even if worms weren’t visible.
At first, Schulman began barerooting her products: washing the roots and dumping the soil in an area of the property she knew to be already infested. But even in her small nursery, that rapidly became an extraordinarily laborious process. “I was getting really discouraged about that because it was just so much work,” she says. But other research suggested that heat could kill both worms and cocoons. Schulman thought she could try using her greenhouse. “I figured most plants could survive 105 degrees F for a short time.”
After testing several species of plants to make sure they could survive, Schulman developed a protocol in which she closed up her greenhouse to get it to about 115-120 F, with her stock inside, aiming to get each pot at 105 F through and through for at least 20 minutes, to ensure mortality—a process which took about 4-5 hours.
Her plants drooped, but survived and recovered once in cooler temps. After treatment, her products went onto inexpensive benches made from pallets and cinder blocks, where they now stay until well after the first cold temperatures of winter kill off the worms around her property.
Three years since the initial heat treatment, all of her products still appear to be clean. She has not yet needed to repeat the remediation.
“I was really pleased that a lot of things did really well,” Schulman says. “That was the game-changer for me. I don’t think I could’ve proceeded by root washing everything. I would’ve had to really scale back and throw stuff out.”
As to the other question: Schulman opted for complete transparency with her customers. “I felt inclined to trust people, and trust customers, and felt that they had a right to know the full scope of what they were purchasing.”
Her website’s main page now sports a discussion about her jumping worms discovery, her remediation efforts, and what risks can still remain. She describes the response as “incredibly positive.” Based on her conversations, people are reluctant to buy plants they know are infested and untreated (even if they know they have jumping worms in their own yards). But when they’re informed about worms and the steps were taken to attempt to correct the issue, even if those steps cannot come with guarantees, they are much more open to buy.
Schulman is now writing up a protocol of her methods and the plant species she used, which she hopes will be able to help other growers in the same predicament. She believes this is a method that may work well for anyone with access to a greenhouse or hoop house, albeit with caveats: She didn’t use any woody plants, and the pot size in her experience appeared to be limited to about 1-gallon. The process also required constant monitoring, because her pots heated unevenly, depending on water content, root density, and maybe other variables. During the Great Remediation, she’d had to run in and out of the greenhouse constantly to measure the soil of individual pots. “It’s also a good way to give yourself heat stress,” she laughs.
Schulman is happy to be a resource for other growers facing the same issue. “I think the more people talk about it, and think about this, the better,” Schulman says. She invites growers to reach out to her at birdandbeeplants@gmail.com.
New research led by collaborating researcher Maryam Nouri-Aiin has confirmed heat sensitivity in adult and cocooned Amynthas species in small containers, and identified new lethal time and temperature combinations, particularly over 40 C (104 F).
Short-term heat pulses as demographic bottlenecks for Amynthas earthworms: temperature–time mortality across life stages
Leibovich, O., Schall, J. J., Görres, J., & Nouri-Aiin, M. 2026. Basic and Applied Ecology, 94, p.85.
Photos by Tobi Schulman
