Cheryl:

Mine love the pulp from juicing. I mostly juice carrots. Oh, and banana peels - they seem to like that a lot!

I don't think the worms like "it" too stinky. When my bin has gotten too pungent a few start climbing upwards (I have one of those something-gallon Rubbermaids) so I have to add more bedding and leave the cover off for a couple days then things get back to normal.

Have fun!!!

Worm Nelly

I haven't had any worms come out in my catch try but occasionally I've had some crawl up the sides of the bin. They tend to do this when things get either too wet or the bin gets too acidic.

Both situations are easy to remedy. If too wet I just add some dry, shredded newspaper and leave the lid off (covering the top with sheets of dry newspaper). If too acidic (if you feed citrus or coffee grounds this often happens), I just sprinkle in a couple of tablespoons of calcium carbonate over the bedding.

As far as feeding them I save all of our veggie/fruit scraps, coffee grounds and egg shells in the freezer. At the end of the week I take a couple of hours to make batches of worm food. I thaw the scraps and grind them up in a food processor then I refreeze the resulting mush in freezer bags. I keep a 2 liter ice cream container of mush in the fridge labeled "worm food" and use that to feed my bins throughout the week. As the ice cream container gets used up, I thaw a bag of worm mush to refill it.

By the way, the ground up egg shells serves two purposes: to add some "grit" to the worm's gizzards so they may better digest their food and to help offset the acidity of the coffee grounds.

Worm bins shouldn't have any smell if they are balanced properly. If you find that you are smelling anything, you are probably overfeeding the worms. The smell comes from rotting food. Just scale back on the food and let your little critters catch up.

Good luck!

citrus and coffee grounds do not cause acidic conditions - coffee bean acidity is leached into the coffee by the brewing process, the spent grounds are near neutral and citrus is actually no more acidic than many other fruits [like apple juice, my business] ... citrus has an oil called limonene that delays decomposition, otherwise it's the same as any other food waste

Bill

Bill, you are cool. I am glad you spend so much time answering all our questions :)