Preparing your food scraps

From WormWiki

Worms seem to be very tolerant of differing situations and there is a whole range of things you can do to prepare your food scraps, or you can do nothing.

First, don't put in meat or oil. Then pick one or more of the methods below for your fruit peels, veggie scraps, anything that's too old to eat or rotten....

• Put your food directly in the bin.

    + easiest
    - the food lasts a long time, so if you're in a hurry to harvest, this isn't the best method.  (If you're going on a long vacation, this is great.)

• Cut your food up into smaller chunks. This seems to be very common. It give the microbes more surface area to work on,

    + the food is consumed more quickly than the above method
    + doesn't take much work.

• Use a food processor.

    - uses electricity and is more work - some see that as counter productive to what they're trying to accomplish (including Mary Appelhof)
    + results in a more consitent quality vermicompost produced more quickly.

• Combined with any of the top three, you can freeze your scraps.

    + This kills any insect eggs (particularly fruit flies) and breaks cell walls of the plants, increasing the speed at which the bacteria can handle it.

• Pre-compost your food - big favorite with many, esp. larger scale vermicomposters.

    * Put scraps in a bin and let them sit and get colonized with bacteria before putting them in the worm bin.  Some recommend mixing the food with bedding at this point.  From my reading, a week or two is what's recommended.

    * For large amounts, hot compost your food/ manure/ grass and garden clippings, leaves.... before giving it to the worms.  This seems to be the best of all the options, but depends on your having the volume of organic material to compost and space to make it work.

I'm in a studio apartment and have had trouble with fruit flies. I process and then freeze all my food. When I have more worms and a second bin, I may go to the 'cut to small pieces and freeze' method.