One of my friends bought me this book for Christmas and considering the snowy weather keeping us indoors all weekend, I got to reading. We had a fairly successful summer last year of growing a few of our own vegetables and tomatoes – even now some of our herbs seem to be resolutely battling through the icicles. We also bought a composter and poking around in it yesterday it looks like we’ll have our first load of compost read for springtime. Don’t laugh, we’re really excited about this!

But then chatting to some friends over Christmas, they mentioned the huge success of their wormery. Working on a very similar principle to the composter but on a much smaller scale, it provides you not only with very rich compost but also a super-rich liquid feed (worm pee to you and me). Most wormeries are split into three or so sections. The top bit is where you put your kitchen waste. It then filters down to the second part which is where the worms are. They eat up the waste and then their wee seeps down to the third part. Some wormeries have a tap installed here so all you do is open the tap and pour the liquid into a container ready to sprinkle over your plants. So there’s no touching worms or scrounging around in the muck – thank goodness!

Apparently you can make your own wormery but personally I’m happy just to buy a ready-made one, thank you very much.

Now, I need to get my head round the fact that they send you live worms in the post!

Lara Crisp, Managing Editor

P.S. For A&B’s own answer to Alan Titchmarsh enjoy the memoir View From a Shed !