You are about to start using your Worm Studio! Now what do you feed your new wormy friends?
During the first couple of days, let your worms adjust to their new homes without adding any food. RESIST the urge to take a peek, and let them get comfy!
After a couple of days, give them few pieces of food. Start with something they love like a watermelon rind! When you are ready to feed your wormies, remember these 4 things:
1. FREEZE & CHOP
It helps to feed them food scraps that are soft and FROZEN. Freezing the food first will significantly reduce flies and it will make the scraps mushy and easier to eat. Blending or chopping scraps before freezing gives a larger surface area for the microbes to start digesting.
2. DIG A HOLE
The first step is to dig a hole in the bedding, add your scraps and then completely cover with bedding this will help keep fruit flies away!
2. ADD MORE (MOIST) BEDDING
The worms will munch on the bedding as well as food scraps, so you can start to add bedding as it is eaten (every feeding or so) Excess bedding is never a problem!
3. THE QUADRANT METHOD
Mentally divide your bin into 4 sections and rotate feeding one section per week. You will know if you are over- or underfeeding by week 5.
WHAT TO FEED THEM?
We want our hard working worms to be as happy and healthy as possible! Think of your wormies as VEGANS. Ground up eggshells are OK because this "grit" aids in wormy digestion. Since worms do not have any teeth, grit helps break down food.
After about 8 months, your worm population will have grown, and they will become less picky. You can feed them almost all your kitchen scraps! Keep freezing the food, but you don't have to chop it up.
HOW TO FEED THEM?
The Worm Studio is a balanced ECO-SYSTEM containing earthworms, other composting organisms, and invisible micro-organisms! This makes up the the living part of the soil, and they all work together to break down your scraps.
It usually takes a new bin anywhere between 2-3 months to fully come to life (for the microbial activity to spread). PATIENCE IS KEY! You are building an ecosystem from the ground up! Don't rush it, and resist overfeeding too early.
Composting is a natural way to return nutrients back into our soils, a beautiful closed loop system! We are trying to IMITATE NATURE in our worm studio.
