“The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms”, by Amy Stewart, is 200 pages of fun for any home worm keeper. While Stewart’s home worm keeping, including her own journey and experiences, inform the book and pop up throughout the text, the focus is larger. Starting with Darwin, Stewart covers a broad swath of worm science. The writing is easy to follow, refreshing, and interesting. At least if you’re interested in worms. However, as the subtitle indicates, if you aren’t already, you may be amazed by what they can do! These lowly creatures, with hardly any organs at all, are responsible for creating soil. And, as the book Dirt showed http://bouldervermicomposting.com/2008/12/31/book-review-dirt/ , soil is the foundation of human civilization.
Stewart does a great job of describing some of the characters in the world of worms. Sam Jones http://www.nhm.ku.edu/inverts/sam_james/ started out studying grasslands, but ended up “one of the world’s leading earthworm taxonomists”. Exotic species of worms are now his passion, to the point of creating a “Worms of the Philippines” poster (I search for this online, but was unable to find a reference). She also goes to Ohio and talks to Clive Edwards http://entomology.osu.edu/personnelsingle.asp?strid=180 , a professor who’s done a lot of experiments on the efficacy of worm castings. Edwards on vermicompost: “We found that 2 to 4 tons [of worm castings] per acre [of cornfield] increased yields, and also reduced crop loss due to disease and damaged fruit. Not only that but there was a residual benefit that lasted up to four years.” Scott Subler, a former coworker of Edwards, founded a worm composting company, which unfortunately doesn’t appear to be around anymore. He is interviewed talking about vermicomposting dairy cow manure with an industrial grade worm “reactor”. He has even “gone on QVC to sell his product and spread the message about the benefits of worm castings”. Subler has found that “the inputs [to vermicomposting] are not the problem… It’s the output that’s a problem”; that has certainly been what I’ve found in my readings on large-scale vermiculture.
I don’t want to give the impression that Stewart focuses on people entirely. On the contrary, each chapter is devoted to a specific aspect of worm knowledge or history. She discusses the business of raising worms for sale, spends a page or two on the biological history of worms, writes about how she harvests and uses her worm castings, and covers different types of worms. She even talks about the difference between red wigglers and redworms (they’re different species). Stewart even visits a sewage plant in California, where her uncle is working on a pilot project to use worms to process biosolids (I didn’t see any mention of vermicomposting on the facility website http://www.cityofpacifica.org/depts/wwt/caleracreek/about_the_facility.asp so I guess the pilot project didn’t work out).
Stewart’s book covers wide ground, from Darwin’s studies of worms to modern use of worms as biodetectors, from giant worms in Australia to the destruction of the Minnesota forests, due to non-native worms (more on that here http://bouldervermicomposting.com/2009/01/22/invasive-earthworms-paper/ ). She also has a very useful epilogue where she discusses how to get started keeping worms, a two-page bibliography full of interesting books that talk about worms, and an appendix full for resources, from newsletters to websites to worm bins. The book was published in 2004, but many of the resources listed are still around.
All in all, a fantastic, fun book. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
“The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms”, by Amy Stewart, is 200 pages of fun for any home worm keeper. While Stewart’s home worm keeping, including her own journey and experiences, inform the book and pop up throughout the text, the focus is larger. Starting with Darwin, Stewart covers a broad swath of worm science. The writing is easy to follow, refreshing, and interesting. At least if you’re interested in worms. However, as the subtitle indicates, if you aren’t already, you may be amazed by what they can do! These lowly creatures, with hardly any organs at all, are responsible for creating soil. And, as the book “Dirt” showed, soil is the foundation of human civilization.
Stewart does a great job of describing some of the characters in the world of worms. Sam Jones started out studying grasslands, but ended up “one of the world’s leading earthworm taxonomists”. Exotic species of worms are now his passion, to the point of creating a “Worms of the Philippines” poster (I search for this online, but was unable to find a reference). She also goes to Ohio and talks to Clive Edwards, a professor who’s done a lot of experiments on the efficacy of worm castings. Edwards on vermicompost:
We found that 2 to 4 tons [of worm castings] per acre [of cornfield] increased yields, and also reduced crop loss due to disease and damaged fruit. Not only that but there was a residual benefit that lasted up to four years.
Scott Subler, a former coworker of Edwards, founded a worm composting company, which unfortunately doesn’t appear to be around anymore. He is interviewed talking about vermicomposting dairy cow manure with an industrial grade worm “reactor”. He has even “gone on QVC to sell his product and spread the message about the benefits of worm castings”. Subler has found that “the inputs [to vermicomposting] are not the problem… It’s the output that’s a problem”; that has certainly been what I’ve found in my readings on large-scale vermiculture.
I don’t want to give the impression that Stewart focuses on people entirely. On the contrary, each chapter is devoted to a specific aspect of worm knowledge or history. She discusses the business of raising worms for sale, spends a page or two on the biological history of worms, writes about how she harvests and uses her worm castings, and covers different types of worms. She talks about the difference between red wigglers and redworms (they’re different species). Stewart even visits a sewage plant in California, where her uncle is working on a pilot project to use worms to process biosolids (I didn’t see any mention of vermicomposting on the facility website so I guess the pilot project didn’t work out).
Stewart’s book covers a lot of ground, from Darwin’s studies of worms to modern use of worms as biodetectors, from giant worms in Australia to the destruction of the Minnesota forests, due to non-native worms (more on that here). She also has a very useful epilogue where she discusses how to get started keeping worms, a two-page bibliography full of interesting books that talk about worms, and an appendix full for resources, from newsletters to websites to worm bins. The book was published in 2004, but many of the resources listed are still around.
All in all, a fantastic, fun book. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it.
September 7th, 2009
If you don’t want to buy ‘Worms Eat My Garbage‘ and are feeling a bit adventurous, Boulder County Open Space outlines pretty much everything you need to get started with worm composting. It also has contact information for local sources for redworms. From the introduction:
If you don’t have a backyard, live in the mountains, or don’t have space for a big bin, you can still compost your kitchen scraps with red wriggler worms.
Go read the page if you’re on the fence!
Updated 2/28/2009: Corrected links, which had changed.
February 7th, 2009
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery, is a fascinating read. I’ve been describing it to friends as Collapse written through the lens of soil. While Diamond’s work is more far reaching, Dirt benefits from the focus. Montgomery begins with an overview of what dirt is, including the various layers of it, then jumps right into history, and how each civilization has used (or abused) its soil. He covers the whole gamut of Western civilization, from Mesopotamia to Iowa, with stops in the Mayan Empire, Iceland, islands off Peru, and Rome during the Empire. He also discusses soil science, from the empirical terracing of the ancients to the more methodical scientific investigations of recent times.
I was most impressed by his melding of soil science with history. I found the book compelling in the same way as a train wreck you see in a movie–you know what is going to happen, but you still watch in horrified fascination. But this isn’t a movie, and the facts are clear–we’re currently “mining” our soil for food. Even with the addition of fossil fuel based fertilizers, top soil depletion is happening. This topsoil took thousands of years to form, and our farming methods are reducing it at a much faster rate.
Other civilizations, from Mesopotamia to the Mayans, have followed the path of topsoil depletion, and results were not pretty. When your soil is mined out, it takes a long time for it to come back (precisely how long is tough to say–soil rates do vary immensely because of climate and topography). When you don’t have soil, you don’t have food. When you don’t have food…
He only mentions worms a few times: Darwin’s famous last treatise on worms, “The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits” where he estimated an acre of good English soil has “almost four hundred pounds of worms”; how worms plow the soil of the author’s yard, which he does not water; and how traditional plowing of soils does worms no good. His focus is not on vermiculture, but on the soil that is a complex living system, of which earthworms are a crucial part.
But anyone who keeps worms and sees the rich castings produced, or puts vermicompost on plants and watches them spring to life, can’t doubt that soils and worms are interrelated. Reading this book taught me much about soils and how they have been farmed and misused throughout human civilization, as well as the consequences thereof.
December 31st, 2008
