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We highly recommend two books related to promoting a healthy, sustainable environment: Teaming with Microbes and Worms Eat My Garbage. Teaming with Microbes focuses on the importance of healthy, living soil for our environment and how we can obtain healthy, living soil, while reducing the need for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in gardens and farms. Worms Eat My Garbage provides a complete guide to composting with worms (vermicomposting) to convert food and garden scraps into all-natural worm compost for your garden.
Teaming with Microbes - 2010 REVISED Edition!
Smart gardeners know that soil is anything but an inert substance. Healthy soil is teeming with life – not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants and become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of artificial, often toxic, substances. But there is an alternative to this vicious cycle. We can garden in a way that strengthens the soil food web – the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms whose interactions create a nurturing environment for plants.
Teaming with Microbes extols the benefits of cultivating the soil food web. First, it clearly explains the activities and organisms that make up the web. Next, it explains how gardeners can cultivate the life of the soil through the use of compost, mulches, and compost tea. The revised edition updates the original text and includes two completely new chapters – on mycorrhizae (beneficial associations fungi form with green-leaved plants) and archaea (single-celled organisms once thought to be allied to bacteria).
With Jeff Lowenfels’s help, everyone – from devotees of organic gardening techniques to weekend gardeners who simply want to grow healthy, vigorous plants without resorting to chemicals – can create rich, nurturing, living soil. 
Authors: Jeff Lowenfel and Wayne Lewis
“A breakthrough book for the field of organic gardening.” American Gardener
Price: $23.95
Worms Eat My Garbage: How to setup & maintain a vermicomposting system
The definitive guide to vermicomposting--a process using redworms to recycle food waste into nutrient-rich food for plants. Provides complete illustrated instructions on setting up and maintaining small-scale worm composting systems. Internationally recognized, the author has worked with worms for nearly three decades. Topics include different bins, what kind of worms to use, sex life of a worm, preparing worm beddings, how to meet the needs of the worms, what kinds of foods to feed the worms, harvesting worms, and making potting soil from the vermicompost produced. Second edition. 
Author: Mary Appelhof
Level: Grade 5 through adult
Price: $11.95
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