Mary Appelhof - helps us compost our produce scraps

Dateline: Kalamazoo

                   Wendell the Worm here with my good
                   friend Mary Appelhof, otherwise known
                   as "The Worm Woman" of Kalamazoo,
                   Michigan. She's been working with us
                   worms for the past 25 years. Her book,
                   "Worms Eat My Garbage," was originally
                   published in 1982 and has sold over
                   90,000 copies - many of which are in
                   local libraries. Based on that number,
                   she believes there are over a million
                   people with worm bins in the US, as of
                   1996.

                   So why are worm bins so popular? And
                   what makes someone study us worms in
                   the first place?

                   Here's her story.

                   WENDELL: "Mary, how did you first
                   become interested in worms?"

                   WORM WOMAN: "Well, I started with
                   worms by ordering two pounds of them
                   one winter. I set up a worm bin in my
                   basement which had manure in it, and
                   peat moss and leaves. And I found that I
                   could bury my garbage in it too, such as
                   apple cores, coffee grinds, etc., and the
                   worms would eat it and turn it into rich
                   potting soils without having any smells. It
                   was amazing to find that out!"

                   WENDELL: "Yeah, don't just judge us
                   from the worms who shrivel up on the
                   sidewalk! Take a look at us in our
                   natural habitat - or in a worm bin."

                   WW: "I think that having a worm bin, for
                   instance, where you've got worms and
                   you can look at them on a regular basis
                   everyday, and see the changes in the
                   bin and watch them move, see them lay
                   cocoons or see a cocoon which a worm
                   does lay, and then see the baby worms
                   hatch from these cocoons, these are the
                   kinds of things that are just fascinating
                   to watch and it always changes."

                   Inside a Worm Bin
                   WENDELL: "Mary, what is it like inside a
                   worm bin?"


 WW: "Basically, it's a system which has a
 container. And that container has to have some
 provision for aeration or for oxygen (air) to get
 into it, either by holes in the side or the bottom,
 or perhaps lacking a top or perhaps in tubes,
 which make it possible for air to get inside the
 bin, a bedding that every often can be just
 shredded newspaper for the worms to live in.
 This bedding needs to be moist, because
 worms need to be moist in order to exchange
 gases across their skin. And add a little bit of
 soil. The soil helps to provide grit for the
 worms' gizzards and a source of bacteria for the decomposing which goes
 on in a worm bin. And of course it contains worms."

 WENDELL: "Yeah. My relatives wrote me about this once. When you start
 adding garbage to the bin and the bacteria start to break it down and
 make it soft and mushy, then this becomes the kind of food my relatives
 can eat. So they suck up the juices of the decomposing garbage, add
 bacteria to it in their own bodies, absorb the nutrients they like and
 excrete the rest. And then you humans can use their poop."

 The Right Worms
 WW: "But you need the right kind of worms, and there are two general
 categories of worms, one is composting worms, like redworms, which live
 in leaf litter and manure heaps and compost piles, and soil-dwelling
 worms, like nightcrawlers, which live in the soil. Now if you're setting up a
 worm bin, you need to get the composting worms. You can't just go to the
 garden and get worms and expect them to work! Worms for composting
 need to be able to live in high concentration of organic material. They
 don't like living in the soil and they reproduce well and they can tolerate
 being stirred up all the time. So you gotta use the right worm for the job -
 redworms."

 WENDELL: "Yeah, you bet. I'm a nightcrawler and I just couldn't deal with
 people messing around with my burrow - or dumping vegetables on my
 head for that matter. Well, Worm Woman, we're running out of time now,
 so any last words about worm bins?"

 WW: "People who hear about worm bins very often will just turn up their
 nose and say, 'No Way,' but these same people who come to Earth Day
 and somebody can show them that there really isn't anything there that's
 going to hurt them, and that it really doesn't smell as much as they expect
 it would, and they can learn to live with it. When they realize being able to
 turn the most repulsive part of their garbage into something useful,
 sometimes that will be enough to make them do something that they
 thought they might be afraid to do."

 WENDELL: "Thank you Worm Woman for joining us. And good luck with
 your worms! This is Wendell the Worm reporting."