Two pounds of African nightcrawlers. One bin. Your job: keep them alive, feed them right, and harvest castings before the bin teaches you a lesson. This is the closest thing to running a real bin without the smell — and it teaches the real rules: precompost your food, keep it damp as a wrung-out sponge, keep it warm, and remember that leachate is not worm tea.

Ready for the real thing? Worm Castings 101 is the full guide, and the Soil Food Web Explorer shows what your worms are doing down in the dark.

More new tools: Soil Food Web Explorer and Call in the Cavalry.