Worms Eat My Garbage

by Mary Appelhof

This awesome little book (with terrible cover art) is the definitive manual about keeping worms for vermicomposting. All of the gardening books I've read that mention worm farming point to this book, so I finally waited my turn to borrow it from the library. It's got all the basic information you need to set up a worm-composting system, and more than that, too. What kind of container to make or buy, what kind of bedding to use, how to set it up, where to keep it, how to maintain temperature and moisture, what kind of environment the worms need, how to manage the system depending on if you want worms for fishing bait or good black compost or both (or even if you want to raise worms for sale) and so on. What you can put in your vermiculture box, and what you can expect to get out of it. Charts and weights and volumes of input and output. Even some details on the biology of worms and different species. Lots of reference material in the back for further reading in whatever direction you want to take this interest. This is one of those books I found so useful on the first reading I'm already looking for a copy to add to my personal library. I'm ready now, armed with what it's taught me, to order my own worms (got the box built weeks ago). Hopefully if all goes well there will soon be posts on my gardening blog about my own worm bin and its workings! Thanks in part to this book which made me realize it's not that hard, just get started.

Rating: 4/5 ....... 162 pages, 1997

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