The Worm Lady

Today I met a woman named Jane Coale, who had set up a table at an area nature preserve. She uses statistics and information to encourage people to compost. I spoke with her for a few minutes and took one of her handouts.

Jane lives fulltime in an RV and she is passionate about compost. She has been composting since 1965, with or without worms, and she has helped various institutions start composting programs or solve their composting problems. If you tell Jane what your compost is doing, such as smelling bad or not decomposing, she will have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and how to fix it. She recommends a balance of brown (dead leaves, straw, sawdust, paper napkins and cardboard, etc.) and green (fresh organic matter, such as kitchen scraps or weeds). Jane says to always cover your green stuff with brown stuff to prevent smells and fruitflies.

I have never composted with worms except those that make their way into the compost pile from the ground, and I was very interested in the red wigglers she had in a box on the table. She said that they are native worms, and if they escape they won't harm the environment, but they don't try to escape. She has had hers for years.

Jane told me that 70% of the trash we send to landfills can be fed to worms or composted: yard waste, manure, and kitchen waste. Worms eat their weight in kitchen scraps in two days, and they produce 60% of the weight they eat as fertilizer. They can live between the temperatures of 45 and 90 degrees, but thrive from 65 to 75 degrees, and in ideal conditions they double their numbers in two to three months.

The worms didn't look disgusting to me, and they sound easy to care for. If I didn't have room in my yard for several compost piles, I would definitely get a worm bin for my basement.

Jane Coale calls herself the Worm Lady. She says "Help the planet--small and simple deeds can make a huge difference if enough people do them."