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Abstract: Casing soil for commercial cultivation of mushrooms should have high water holding capacity and adequate moisture (Edward and Flegg, 1954; Flegg, 1954). Generally sandy soil has good porosity but low water holding capacity. Sometimes one needs to use peat or peatmoss mixed with soils in order to improve soil characteristics, particularly to increase water holding capacity (Kligman, 1950). The most popular peat in Taiwan is Pu-li peat whose water holding capacity is not so high but around 1.0 (g H2O/g solid). Also, there is a scarcity of high quality peat in Taiwan. The soils in Taiwan are not ideal for casing, because usually their water holding capacity does not exceed 0.3 (Chang, 1971). Therefore spent composts, after adequate treatment, have been used in some mushroom farms in Taiwan (Wu, and Hsu, 1976). Since spent composts are still rich in nutrients, we started to work on the castings of earthworms fed with spent composts. In this paper, we will present (1) the approximate composition of castings, and, (2) the effect of diet on the quality castings of earthworms fed with different spent compost diets and (3) the effect of different casing soils made up different quantities of earthworm castings on mushroom production.
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