Home composting is essential for serious gardeners. Affectionately known as "black gold", compost is the nutritious, loamy material you get from letting organic matter decompose. It enriches the soil ...

Red wigglers from Will's Worms, a home-based business owned by siblings Will and Alyssa Hatanaka, ages 7 and 8. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times) Wriggly, voracious Eisenia fetida — red wiggler ...

Squiggly, wiggly red worms munching their way through discarded food scraps are a delightful sight to behold. And they come highly recommended by vermicomposting hobbyist Kim Johnson of Mount Vernon, ...

Food waste — kitchen scraps, restaurant leftovers, and expired food that gets tossed out at grocery stores — decays quickly. That process generates more methane than any other material that ends up in ...

Many gardeners rely on compost to help improve their soils. Taking compost a step further, some gardeners use worms to break down the compost even more. Vermicomposting, or worm composting, uses red ...

To worm or not to worm? When it comes to composting, that’s the question many savvy gardeners are pondering these days, and for good reason: Worm castings — a.k.a. poop — are the nutrient-rich organic ...

I first learned about ‘in situ’ worm communities several years ago in fruit orchards. Farmers were using a combination of in-orchard and in-ground vermiculture (cultivating/farming of worms) and ...

There’s a yardstick among gardeners that good, rich soil with lots of actively decaying organic matter in it should have about a dozen or more earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) in each cubic foot. But ...

Sonoma County is about to roll out the red carpet for some unlikely celebrities: worms. With two composting workshops on the calendar this fall, locals have a chance to see firsthand how these slim, ...

Wriggly, voracious Eisenia fetida — red wiggler worms — could be the new livestock for Southern California gardeners ... if only they were easier to find. The demand for composting worms skyrocketed ...