The Perfect Diet for Compost Worms

What do worms eat? Learn all about the best diet to feed your compost worms, including food scraps like apples and lettuce, and what not to feed them.

By Mary Appelhof And Joanne Olszewski
Updated on June 13, 2022
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Adobe Stock/galitsin

What do worms eat? Learn all about the best diet to feed your compost worms, including what not to feed them.

What’s waste to me or you may be slop for the pigs or food for the dog or someone else. I have previously used such terms as organic kitchen waste and table scraps, but now it’s time to be more specific about what waste you can expect to feed to your worms.

Kitchen Waste from Meal Preparation

Any vegetable waste that you generate during food preparation can be used: potato peels, grapefruit and orange rinds, outer leaves of lettuce and cabbage, celery ends, and so forth. Plate scrapings might include macaroni, spaghetti, gravy, vegetables, or potatoes. Spoiled food from the refrigerator, such as baked beans, moldy cottage cheese, and leftover casserole also can go into the worm bin. Coffee grounds are very good in a worm bin, enhancing the texture of the final vermicompost. Tea leaves, even tea bags and coffee filters, are suitable.

Eggshells can go in as they are. I have found as many as 50 worms curled up in one eggshell. Usually, I dry the shells separately, then pulverize them with a rolling pin so they don’t look quite so obvious when I finally spread the vermicompost in my garden. Grinding up eggshells also increases their surface area. This makes calcium carbonate more readily available to the microorganisms and other decomposers in the bin and, later, to plants in the garden.

The list below shows some of the variety of food waste that can be fed to worms. It was developed from waste actually buried in worm bins I helped establish at a Michigan nature center during a publicly funded project in the 1970s. Coffee grounds don’t appear on the list merely because none of the six participants’ families drank coffee. Use this list as a guideline only; it is not, by any means, comprehensive.

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