When should I start feeding my worms again?

by Bill Brikiatis
(New Hampshire)

About 4 weeks ago I was having trouble with my bin. Many of the worms were up on the side of my plastic tub bin and in the area of the handles.

See blog posts http://bit.ly/elmMPT and http://bit.ly/i2Qkcs for background information on my situation.

Based on what you and others have said, I came to the conclusion that I had two problems that were making life difficult on my worms.

First, I didn't use any bedding and, as a result, the bin didn't have any "brown" material. As a result there was too much nitrogen for the worms. I've slowly added paper stripes, working them in. As part of this process, I've also turned the material to add oxygen.

Second, as my wife orginally suggested, I was feeding the worms too much. It was all food scraps that they like, for example, banana peels, a little pasta, lettuce, etc. But it was too much and the bin was too wet and draining a lot of liquid.

I won't admit it to her, but I think she was right about over feeding, so I've stopped for about 3 weeks. The bin has dried out and the worms are all back in the pile. There aren't a lot of them, but there are some. Much less than a year ago.

My question for you is: when should I start feeding them again? The pile doesn't seem to be going down very quickly. Thanks for your help with this.

Answer from BigTex Worms
First, being a wife myself I will start by saying the wife is always right! Had to get that out of the way. ha.

Yes, overfeeding is a big problem. And as you have discovered there is a lot of misinformation out there in general on worm composting.
To start at the beginning: you should start with bedding materials like peat moss or coconut coir to have the best results. The bedding should be damp. Add your worms and begin feeding at a rate of about 1/2 their weight. So for a pound of worms you would feed 1/2 pound of food. Then feed again when all that first feed is gone, add bedding with each feed. I use the "nest method" when feeding table scraps. Make a little nest out of paper/cardboard shreds for the food to soak up the excess moisture. AND have a good 2" of bedding as your top layer to deter fruit flies.

As for your particular situation, if your bin was really mucky/fudgy and you mixed in some newspaper, I would wait about 2 weeks before feeding. Stick your nose down by the bin and when it smells earthy, not stinky, you can start feeding again. It may take 4 weeks or more depending on how anaerobic the bin was before (without oxygen/too wet = stinky). Then begin feeding with a small amount of food since you do not know the number of worms. LIke a 1/4 cup, always better to underfeed than over feed. And if you could shred up your paper a little finer than what you show in your pics, they will digest it quicker. The coarser the materials, the longer it takes them to digest. Only feed again when all food is gone, it may be slow at first (like one feed a week) until they get the bin going again.

Don't give up! It took me 3 tries before I finally figured it all out some 6 years ago and now here I am with a website on worm composting.

Hope this helps and if you have any further questions, HOLLER at me.

Liz
BigTex Worms