Feeding your vermicompost worms might seem straightforward, but getting the balance right is key to keeping your worm bin thriving. Overfeeding, underfeeding, or feeding too much of a tricky food source can quickly derail your efforts. Don’t worry—we’re here to help you nail the perfect amount of “worm feed” so your red wigglers stay happy, healthy, and productive!
How Much Can Vermicompost Worms Eat?
Vermicompost worms, like red wigglers, are tiny but mighty when it comes to breaking down organic material. Under ideal conditions, they can consume up to their own weight in food scraps per day. That’s an ambitous amount is ideal condtions with the most easily diegested food source. A better aim is 1/3 to 1/2 of their weight daily, fed in about weekly intervals.
Be careful not to max out their “weight limit” right away. Worms need time to adjust to their environment, and overloading their bin can quickly lead to wet, smelly messes (and unhappy worms).
Rule of Thumb
A safe and sustainable benchmark for feeding your compost worms is 1/3 to 1/2 of their weight per feeding.
- Example: If you have 1 pound of red wigglers, feed them about 5 to 8 ounces of food scraps at a time.
Feed them less frequently at first—every one to three weekd—and observe their habits.
Worm Feeding Tips for Success
Getting the most out of your worm bin involves more than just measuring scraps. Here are some tried-and-tested tips for vermicomposting success!
1. When in doubt, feed less and add more bedding
2. Only Feed When Most Food Has Been Eaten
Before adding new waste, ensure your worms have worked through most of the last feeding. If there’s still a lot of visible food (or if it’s starting to smell), give them more time. Overfeeding can lead to mold, pests, and other unpleasant bin issues.
Take home here: you want to feed based on what your worms are eating, rather than what you’d like them to be eating.
3. Mind the Moisture
A healthy worm bin should feel like a damp sponge—moist, but not dripping wet. If your bin has become too wet or smells bad, it could mean you’re overfeeding. Add more bedding (dry, carbon-rich material like shredded newspaper, cardboard, or coconut coir) to help balance the moisture.
4. Chop It Small
Worms don’t have teeth, so they rely on microorganisms to start to break down food before they can eat it. This will happen naturally, but will go more quickly when food waste is chopped small. Start with coffee grounds and tea leaves that are already gorund up. Then reach for soft fruits and vegetables.
You can help them out by chopping food scraps into smaller chunks or even blending them for faster decomposition. I use a comercial grade meat grinder to help physcially break down worm feed. However, I have created a graveyard of blenders and food processors on my way to finding this option. Pureeing your food waste is harder on your kitchen equipment than you may think. And if you make it too hard on yourself to prepare your worm baby food, your ability to keep up with what you’d ideally like to do.
In short, blend or chop up when you are able. If life gets busy, just throw something simple in and they’ll be fine.
5. Use the freezer for storage to help with breaking down food
One tip for successful vermicomposting is storage of food waste or worm food. As we all know, if you leave too much food waste hanging around, thinks get funky quickly. My favorite tool is to store excess waste in the freezer as it accumulates between feeding your worms. This offers better storage for food waste, but also helps to break down the material and make it easier for worms to consume when added to the bin after having been frozen. This is a more time-efficient way to give your worms a head start than pain-stakingly blending food waste.
6. Start with Worm-Friendly Foods
The internet is an interesting place for worm compost enthusiasts! You will read a lot of strange information about what worms can’t eat. The true answer is that anything that will rot *can* break down in any compost system. The key is about proportion. All of my household food waste is fed to my worms, becasue it’s added to a bunch of spent coffee grounds and fruits and vegetable waste from sources outside of my household.
Possible food source pit falls:
- Acidic or high pH food. I would avoid adding a dozen spoiled lemons as the only food source for worms in a small system. On a large scale, I’m not setting aside a few citrus peels.
- Dairy and meats can become smelly when you’re the main addition to a vermicompost system.
- Feeding only oily foods can coat worms, inhibiting their ability to breath through their skin. I bit of something oily isn’t enough to wipe out a worm farm.
- Bones are obviously slow to break down – though they won’t hurt anything.
Common Misconceptions:
Worms can’t eat onions, garlic or spicy food. This is just not true. They don’t have taste buds. These things break down as quickly as anything else.
Worms will get jacked up on caffine if they’re fed coffee grounds and tea leaves. The caffine (and a bit of acidity in coffee) was in your drink. I actually also get ground (unbrewed) coffee from a local roasting facility when they have botched batches. My worms handle this just fine!
Fail-Safe foods:
When you’re feeding a sub-set of your household food waste, start with the easiest things first. Coffee grounds and tea leaves are already finely ground. Soft fruits and vegetables are going to break down quickly and will be most fail-safe in terms of smells and pH.
7. Grow your Vermicomposting with your Worm Population
Red wiggler worms will approximately double their population every three months when they have space and recources to grow. For this reason, I suggest that new vermicomposters start small and grow the size of their compost system with their worm population. When you start smaller, mistakes are smaller. Your vermicompost system shouldn’t be a smelly, gross mess… but it’s an easy mistake to make. With a smaller system, the changes to get back to ideal conditions are smaller.
This also means, you can expect your worms to continually digest a bit more food waste as they grow. Feel free to feed a bit more as your worm population grows.
Are you feeding your Vermicompost Worms Well?
Here’s how to know if your feeding is working well:
- On Track: Food disappears within a week or so, and your bin smells earthy and pleasant.
- Overfeeding: Food is piling up or becoming slimy and smelly. Solution? Feed less and add more bedding.
- Underfeeding: Food is consistently gone within days and your worms are wriggling actively. Solution? Increase the amount of food scraps gradually.
Why Feeding Properly Matters
Feeding your worms the right amount isn’t just about avoiding unpleasant smells. It’s about supporting an efficient, healthy composting system that benefits both your worms and your plants. Anerobic compoting conditions favour and unfrinedly microbial population, while fresh, aerobic conditions will produce a compost that is rich in healthy micoribial and fungal cummunity that will help your soil cycle nutrients and plants thrive. When your worms are happy, they produce rich, nutrient-packed vermicompost (worm castings) that can take your garden to the next level.
Keep Learning!
Now that you’ve mastered the basics of worm feeding, it’s time to put those tips into practice. Got questions or want to learn more about vermicomposting? Stick with us for even more worm farm tips and tricks. Keep your bin balanced, your worms happy, and your garden blooming!
Happy composting!
–> Amanda at Worm Wrangler
