According to Gillian Elcock and Josie Martens, the great advantage of worm composting is that this can be done indoors and outdoors, thus allowing year round composting. It also provides apartment dwellers with a means of composting. In a nutshell, worm compost is made in a container filled with moistened bedding and redworms. Add your food waste for a period of time, and the worms and micro-organisms will eventually convert the entire contents into rich compost.

Many gardeners use vermicomposting systems for all their garden and kitchen wastes, many more use both types of composting, and thousands of households without gardens use neat and unobtrusive worm boxes indoors to compost their kitchen scraps (as well as newspapers and cardboard boxes), reducing their garbage by up to a third and providing their own organic soil for pot plants and container gardens on balconies and roofs to grow their own healthy food.

• Container - Usually wood and plastic containers. You can build your own or buy one of the many available at gardening shops. Wood is preferred because it is more absorbent and a better insulator for the worms. Experiment and find out what works for you and your worms.
  
• Bedding - It is necessary to provide a damp bedding for the worms to live in, and to bury food waste in. Suitable bedding materials are shredded newspaper and cardboard, shredded fall leaves, chopped up straw and other dead plants, seaweed, sawdust, compost and aged manure.
  
• Worms - The two breeds earthworm used in worm composting are: Eisenia foetida (commonly known as red wiggler, brandling, or manure worm) and Lumbricus rubellus. Many garden centres now supply them, and in most countries they can be bought by mail order from worm farms.
  You'll need 1,000 worms (1 lb) to start a worm box, maybe twice that if you want to process your garden wastes too -- they breed very fast in the right conditions, but starting with more will give the system a good start.

The core components of worm composting are:

In his seminal 1941 book on worm composting, George Sheffield Oliver observed that worm populations double each month. In ideal conditions they can reproduce much faster than that: 1 lb of worms can increase to 1,000 lbs (one million worms) in a year, but in working conditions 1 lb will produce a surplus of 35 lbs in a year, because hatchlings and capsules (cocoons or eggs) are usually lost when the vermicompost is harvested.

This rapid breeding rate means the worm population easily adjusts to conditions in the worm box according to the feed supply and the proportion of worm casts to feed and bedding.

Composting for Profits is a revolutionary new indoor worm composting system, that outlines how to start an indoor organic compost business, and how to create larger and better tasting organic foods using worm composting principles.

Take a look at the Composting for Profits website for more details on how to monetize your passion.

An excellent resource for getting started with worm composting is Worm Farms DIY. Worm Farms DIY is a comprehensive guide that takes you through all the phases of building and maintaining your worm composting farm. The main subjects are:

• Building a Worm Farm
  
• What types of Worms to Buy, How Many & the Breeding Cycle
  
• Starting Your New Worm Farm
  
• Feeding Your Worms
  
• Harvesting the Castings and Worms
  
• Using Castings in Your Garden
  
• Quick Facts about Composting Worms
  
• Other Tips including Moving House and Holidays

Take a look at Worm Farms DIY from its official website by clicking here.

Additional online resources and articles can be found at the following websites:

• Vermicomposting - http://journeytoforever.org
  
• Green Basics Vermicompost - http://www.treehugger.com
  
• Composting With Red Wiggler Worms - http://www.cityfarmer.org