FEEDING WORMS IN YOUR WORM FARM

Feeding Worms

Theoretically, worms can eat their weight in food scraps each day, but in practice, the amount they eat is highly variable. One factor is newness. A new bin doesn’t eat nearly as much as an established bin, no matter how many worms you start with. It may take a few months for a bin to hit its stride and become an eating machine. In the meantime, don’t overfeed. If you add more food than the worms can handle, it will lead to bad smells and possible invasions by undesirable insects.
Start off with just a cup of scraps on the first day. See “What to Feed Worms,” below, for suggestions. Bury the scraps in one corner of the bin and cover it with about an inch of newspaper. The worms will find the food. After a couple of days, add another cup of scraps in another corner. Proceed cautiously, even if you have lots of worms, because they may not want to eat much at first. Develop an intuition for what is enough and what is too much. While it’s important to feed them plenty if you want them to breed, don’t worry much about them going hungry. If they get hungry between feedings, they’ll eat the newspaper. Eventually, they’ll eat everything in the bin. All of the newspaper, cardboard and food scraps will be reduced to black gold: worm castings.

What to Feed Worms

Worms aren’t hamsters. They don’t rush to nibble your fresh offerings. Instead, they work in concert with fungi and bacteria to break down rotten food. If it’s not rotting, they’re not interested. That’s why it usually takes a couple of days before they approach new food. Overall, they prefer soft food, such as oatmeal and squash, to hard food, such as carrots. Of course, even carrots will rot eventually, and the worms will get to them then. Don’t put large chunks of food in a worm bin. Take a moment to rip or cut food scraps into small pieces to speed decomposition.
Worms don’t eat vegetable seeds. Nature designed seeds so that they don’t break down easily. More often than not, the seeds will end up mixed in with the castings and thus could sprout wherever you spread the castings. If this concerns you, separate out seeds before you give food to the worms. Send seeds to the compost pile instead.

Worms like to eat: 

• Coffee grounds and tea leaves
• Crushed eggshells
• Dry cornmeal, just a sprinkle, as a treat
• Fruit of all sorts, except citrus
• Lettuce
• Oatmeal and other cooked grains
• Squash
• Wet bread and bready things like cooked pasta

Worms will eat: 

• Just about any chopped vegetable matter, fresh or cooked
• Newspaper and uncoated cardboard
• Rabbit droppings

Don’t feed worms:

• Citrus of any sort (It’s antimicrobial.)
• Dairy (Traces are OK.)
• Meat
• Oil
• Salty or processed food
• Sugar (Traces are OK.)
• Vinegar

Maintaining the Worm Bin

Put the bin in a safe, quiet place out of direct sunlight, otherwise the sun will shine through the plastic walls and irritate the worms. Wherever you stow the bin, be sure the temperatures are moderate. Keep the lid on tight if you have dogs in the house — canines don’t have discriminating palates. Our dog once nosed off the lid on our worm bin and ate half of the contents before we stopped him. We don’t know whether he was more interested in the worms or the rotten food, but he swallowed it all. If your bin is outside, lock down the lid with a bungee cord to keep raccoons and skunks and other insectivores out at night. And heaven help you if a wandering chicken ever came across your open worm bin!
Aim to keep the contents of the bin always at that magic consistency: moist as a wrung-out sponge. In the first few weeks, you may have to use a spray bottle to mist the paper to keep it from drying out. Worm castings hold water, so when they appear, the bin will stay wet on its own. Your challenge then becomes keeping it dry enough. It’s important that it stay a damp, airy environment. If it seems to be getting soggy and dense, mix in a few handfuls of dry shredded newspaper to dry it out and fluff it up. If lots of worms are hanging out on the sides or lid of the bin — or trying to wiggle out the air holes — it’s definitely too wet.
Note: Keeping the lid on the bin keeps out the light and also keeps out flies. However, it holds in a lot of moisture. If you’re having trouble keeping the bin dry enough, you could cut a window out of the lid, and then use duct tape to secure a piece of window screen over the hole. That way, you have both air and protection. If you do this, keep the bin in a dim place for the worms’ sake.
The deeper the contents of the bin, the greater the danger of the bottom portion of the bin turning swampy and anaerobic. To prevent that, don’t let the contents of the bin get too deep. Keep the depth of the contents between 6 and 8 inches and you should be fine. If you have a ton of worms and 6 to 8 inches doesn’t seem like enough room, it’s time to start a second bin, give your extra worms to friends who want to start their own bins, or feed some spares to your chickens. You could also distribute a few handfuls in a cool compost pile.
Don’t be afraid to dig around in the bin every so often to make sure all is well. Check regularly to be sure there’s never any standing water in the bottom of the bin. Bad smells will ensue, and worms will die. If all is well, eventually you should see tiny baby worms in the mix, as well as the little lemon-shaped beads that are worm cocoons. These are good signs. Your worms are happy and breeding. As your bin matures, you may find that other critters — decomposers such as mites, pot worms and tiny black beetles — will make it their home as well. This is nothing to worry about. They’re all doing the same work, and the worms don’t mind the company.

Before you go on vacation, feed the worms well and add fresh bedding. They’ll be fine for a couple of weeks.

Harvesting the Castings

When the contents of the bin start looking more black than anything else, it’s time to harvest some castings. This will probably happen about two months after you start the bin. The simplest way is to stop adding fresh food for a while and let the worms finish up the little scraps and bits dotting the bin. When there’s not much recognizable food in the bin, put a big portion of something delicious — a proven favorite such as squash — at one end of the bin. The worms will migrate that direction. Wait a few days, then scoop out the material on the opposite side of the bin and pile it on the bin lid. Do this during the day or under bright lights. Form the pile into a pyramid or cone shape. There will still be worms in the mix, and they’ll dive down to the bottom center of the mound to hide from the light. You can then harvest the castings from the top and sides of the mound and transfer them to a bucket or bowl. Return the worms hiding at the bottom of the pile to the bin.
Add fresh wet newspaper and soil to the bin, just as you did at the beginning, to rebuild after harvest. Mix this material with the remaining material and start feeding normally again.
Freshly harvested worm castings are very wet. Spread them out on a tray and let them air-dry for a few days, and then sift them through a screen or colander. This will catch any remaining food scraps and give the castings a nice granular texture that's easy to spread. Store them in a bag or covered container.

Worm Tea

One excellent use of castings is in a liquid plant tonic. Put 1 pint of castings in a bucket. Add a gallon of warm water and a spoonful of molasses. Stir this well, and stir it frequently over the course of 24 to 48 hours. Dilute the resulting liquid at the ratio of 1 part tea to 4 parts water and use it to water container plants and fruit trees. You can use it in your vegetable beds, but they should already be well nourished by compost and thus don't need it as much. It’s best to use all of your worm tea in a week or so.

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