10 studies, every one read at the publisher and cited on the page where it is used. A worm bin is not a compost heap. It is a livestock enclosure — and almost every beginner failure comes from running one while believing you are running the other. A compost heap succeeds by getting hot; 55 °C is the whole point of it. A worm bin has already failed by the time it reaches 30 °C, because the animals doing the work flee above about 29 °C and have nowhere to go. Same bucket of kitchen scraps, opposite success conditions. Carry one machine's numbers into the other and you kill it — and the moisture setting alone will do it, because at 80 per cent a compost heap has gone anaerobic and failed, while at 80 per cent a worm bin is near its optimum. The finding this book is built on Reading the primary literature turned up something no consumer guide carries, and it is triangulated across four independent papers: Every dial on a worm bin has two optima — one for the animal and one for the product — and they are never in the same place. Moisture. Cocoons are laid overwhelmingly at 65–70 per cent by weight. The heaviest worms in a thirty-week trial — 1100 mg after thirteen weeks — were grown at 75 per cent. And at that same 75 per cent, that trial produced the fewest cocoons of any level tested. A bin run for maximum worm growth is a bin being quietly sterilised. Stocking density. Measured side by side in one system: 0.50 kg/m² to grow worm biomass, 3.00 kg/m² to make vermicompost. A six-fold difference, in the same bin, and it decides which of the two you get. So you have to choose which machine you are running. Nobody selling worms mentions that there is a choice. What is in it Why a bin that heats has already failed, and the mechanism — the worms do not make the heat, the same microbes that run a hot heap do, and overfeeding is what lets them start. The fix is mechanical rather than chemical: feed in layers of 25–50 mm (1–2 inches), so heat escapes as fast as it is made. The temperature band, given as a band. The extension services and the laboratory work disagree by about five degrees about where the top of the range is. That disagreement is printed rather than smoothed over, because the top end is the end where bins die. What actually poisons a bin, in numbers. Salt is lethal at 0.5 per cent and ammonium acetate at 0.1 per cent — which rules out more of an ordinary kitchen (brine from olives or pickles, the liquid from tinned fish, salted cooking water, most sauces and stock) than any of the usual "no" lists do. Those lists lead with citrus and onion; this book gives you the three chemistries that have measured numbers behind them and declines to repeat the rest as though it were established. Why the sour smell is a poisoning and not an odour. Anaerobically digested sludge is toxic to earthworms, and the toxicity tracks the material's redox potential rather than anything else about it. The airless layer at the bottom of an overfed bin is the same chemistry — which is why "add more bedding" turns out to be the answer to so many worm-bin questions. Bedding as the system, not the packaging — how much, how deep, how wet, and why the bedding fraction is what keeps hot composting from ever starting. Which worm, with the numbers rather than by habit. Eisenia fetida against the African nightcrawler and Perionyx excavatus: growth rate, hatchlings per cocoon, incubation time, and the tolerance ranges that settle it for an indoor bin in an unheated home. The first eight weeks, week by week — because nothing visible happens for a fortnight, and that is exactly the point at which most bins get interfered with. A fault finder arranged by what you can see — it heats, it smells, they climb the walls — rather than by cause, so it is usable at the moment you actually open the lid. What the harvest is worth, and its ceiling. The largest synthesis of the evidence reports average increases of 26 per cent in commercial yield, 13 per cent in total biomass, 78 per cent in shoot biomass and 57 per cent in root biomass — with the effect peaking where vermicompost is 30 to 50 per cent of soil volume and declining past that. Quoted together with that paper's own admission of publication bias, because a book that sells itself on checked numbers owes you the caveat as well as the number. A corrected myth. "Worms eat half their body weight every day" is not supported by the measurements: the maximum recorded is 0.40–0.45 kg of feed per kg of worm per day, under ideal conditions with an ideal feedstock, and real kitchen bins run below it. Feeding to the folklore figure is one of the commonest ways a new bin is overfed, heats, and dies. What it does not claim No pathogen-kill claim. Vermicomposting never reaches thermophilic temperatures, so it cannot borrow the hot-heap sanitation argument, and the book says so plainly rather than leaving you to assume. No yield promise for a particular crop from a home bin — the meta-analysis figures are for vermicompost as a growing-medium amendment under trial conditions, and they are labelled that way where they appear. No named commercial bin, worm supplier or product anywhere in it. It closes with a page on what the evidence does not establish. What you get PDF — 30 pages, US Letter, prints cleanly at home. EPUB — reflows for phones, tablets and e-readers. 5 figures drawn from the measured data, a printable fill-in bin log, every number in the book collected on one page, and 10 numbered sources. Both formats in one price. Instant download. Nothing ships.