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."