Instructor, Ellen York is in full costume. Apartment dwellers in Vancouver have been taking advantage of a subsidized city program for five years now. And the end product is a dark, nutrient rich fertilizer for your flowers and garden. One article on worms in the local paper generates more calls to us than a whole series on backyard composting. Worm composting may not even be appropriate for the caller, but it gives us a chance to educate them and get them set up with a backyard bin or redirect them to a greenwaste drop off site.
Worms are a great hook for the media too.
Red wigglers have been featured in national daily newspapers, in magazines like Time and Canadian Living and on national television shows like David Tarrant's Canadian Gardener. Trade papers like Worm Digest and Casting Call serve up monthly news from around the worm world including scathing reports on get rich quick scams and reviews of reputable commercial vermiculture books. It would appear that wormania is sweeping the nation. The worm movement began in the 70's with a woman named Mary Appelhof , a biologist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. She wrote the industry bible, Worms Eat My Garbage in 1982.