What To Feed Your Worms

Green waste (compostable yard waste). Anything which once was alive but no longer is, can be fed to worms. There are installations which feed slaughter house refuse to worms, manures from rabbits, horses, cows, pigs, and processed sewage sludge. Worms will happily eat your kitchen scraps, paper napkins, coffee, tea, (and their respective filters), crushed eggshells, melon rinds, pealings etc. Vegetable matter is best and if you have a food processor, the worms will bless you for grinding their supper before feeding it to them.

Some things to avoid are: household chemicals, detergents, oils, and fatty substances like dairy products and peanut butter. Human and pet feces should not be fed to the worms or even composted for that matter as they pose a health risk. Meat scraps are slow and stinky decomposers and often contain a lot of fat so don't use them either. If you cook with a lot of oils or fats or put oils and fatty dressings on your salads, don't feed those leftovers to your worms either. It should go without saying (but here it is anyway), that inorganics like tinfoil, glass, plastic etc., will not be eaten and should not be fed to your worms.

I have fed left over milk and morning cereal, bread of all descriptions, moldy unknowns gleaned from the depths of the refrigerator and a lot of other stuff that I probably shouldn't have fed them, with no adverse effects. Just remember, the fatty stuff can cause problems with odor and the oils can cause respiratory problems (like death), with your *skin breathing* worms.

Commercial growers feed manures, ground grains, alfalfa, sewage sludge, green waste, paper pulp and the like to their worms.

Astute landfill operators use worms to reduce organics of all descriptions in both volume and weight.

Composters feed the critters their yard and garden waste and whatever else they can throw into the heap that is of an acceptable organic origin.

All this munching is done mainly by worms like E. foetida or R. rubellus which are basically leaf layer, rich food source (above ground) kinds of worms. If you were to go to your garden, dig up some worms and try to put them to the same task, they would simply die.

Should you want to increase the number of garden type worms in your soil (good idea that!), then provide winter ground cover, extra food like rotted alfalfa in the spring and fall and, in the summer, mulch thickly with compost to protect them from hot dry conditions. The less you disturb the soil and the less depth to which you disturb it the better life will be for your worms and for your garden. Implanting worms in areas which don't have them works like a champ if you spread them in good numbers over the area and then take care of them as per above.