If they will decompose - they are safe for the worms. Worms eat the bacteria, not the leaves!

rhubarb leaves aren't toxic to humans, the oxalic acid they contain can be because it can cause kidney damage ... you'd have to eat about 10# of them to be so affected - the stems have lower concentrations of oxalic acid as well, and are great with strawberries in pie :)

quite a few different plants contain oxalic acid too, but I've never found, or heard of, any organic material that's toxic to worms, the bacteria worms consume can deal with anything

Bill

HI All! Just so theres no misconception. worms eat anything they can swallow most things put in the bin eventually become small enough for them to ingest including the toxic material. Their bodies do not absorb large enough quantities to harm them most of the time. Salts and alkalin chemicals contain most of the harmful to worm substances. The man made ones especially. Natural chemical combinations do not normally have detrimental effects on worms or any of the decomposers. Its their job to break the compounds down to the atomic level.

I had heard that the exception to this is something in citrus peels. I don't remember the name, but I think I read it on this site. I chopped up all of my vege waste _really_ small and mixed it up before giving it to my worms. (Also, everything was frozen to kill fruit fly eggs, the only down side of worm ranching in Hawaii that I can find ;-) A week later, the only parts of the food that were recognizeable were the orange peels. I decided that I have enough waste to keep my worms happy without the peels. When my herd expands, I may try again with putting citrus peel in one of the bins.

did you chop up the citrus peels _really_ small? - citrus peels will take longer to disappear, but compost soon enough and chopping them up helps - it has an oil called limonene [cooks call it 'zest'] which takes some time to chemically degrade to a point where the bacteria will get past it .... the actinomycete bacteria common in hot composting make short work of oranges, and citrus doesn't affect worms other than not attracting bacteria fast enough

Bill

Yeah, I used a food processor. Two weeks later there were still bright orange bits. Thanks for the info! When I get to the point that they're using all of my vege waste, I'll add the citrus back in. (It's mango season here in Hawaii, I haven't had an orange in quite a while :-)

I haven't fed my guys oranges (don't eat many), but they sure like the grapefruit they get. It's gone in days.

Sherry

Ah...mangoes! Mine just love to clean off the pits (seed). They do a good job too.

As with the citrus peels, too many can alter the ph within, and like Bill says, they take longer for the decomposers to break down and make suitable for the worms.

I can tell with my bin when they need more delicious scraps, all the little white guys (shrimp tail or something like that - they have legs, are white, ovalish and very small) are working over the newsprint, when there is still food, most of them are partyin' on that instead. My bin is still small, so I collect little bits of everything for my worms from my compost bucket, just to give them a varied diet. So it's like: a bit of the bottoms of the asparagus, some lettuce, the smelly alfalfa sprouts that didn't make it into dh's sandwich, chunk of nana peel, red pepper stem and hat, chunk of onion (cleans the blood!) etc. I keep my servings small, and weekly. When I have more room I plan to buy another bin, seed with half of my little one hidden in the kitchen pantry (that dh does not know about) and really go to town on this.

As for toxins, I think I read somewhere else here that experiments have shown that the red wrigglers will process pig manure and their castings show no trace of bugs? Or maybe it was cow manure (e-coli) or chicken manure (salmonella). Sorry to not remember the whole deal,but the idea sounds promising - considering that lettuce and spinach have been pulled from previous shelves because of this problem. I will have to look that up again, but it seems they are nature's little "cleaners".

~kioni~