I have successfully fed my worms both beans and rice. A few things I've learned: the garbanzo beans that I boiled in heavily salted water they never ate. Both the rice and the beans I have successfully fed them had to get completely covered with mold before the worms would touch them. If I could do it again I would have mixed them with damp bedding because they all sort of glomped together in a giant airless mass similar to silly putty. The rice definitely generated a lot of heat as it decomposed; I was glad I only put it in one corner of the bin so that the worms could move to the other side until the temperature cooled. If you are still operating with one pound of worms a couple months out, I would feed it slowly over time, mostly because of the heat.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

Sure, and rice I've done. As W4T mentioned might want to mix it. I mix mine with other food as I do my bread, both starchy materials. It will heat, and not good for water retention. So it gets warm and that warmth helps it get dry (more of an Inn issue than a Bin one). Then it turned into a block of mold which lasts a long time which is a pain as you don't want to disturb it.

For your list, everything except olive oil. Never done it myself and from everything I've read, not something I'd really want to try. Greasy pizza boxes with maybe a little cheese here and there is as much of the oils I've done. So if you mean something like that and not a cup of used olive oil, I guess can try in moderation.

I'll try this in a corner of the bin.

As for the oil content. There was about 1/2 a cup in the whole dish which had roughly 1.5 cups of dry rice and 1.5 cups dry beans when cooked it makes about 3 quarts of beans and rice. The pizza boxes have more oil relative to the volume than the beans and rice.

Pizza boxes eh? This is one I'll have to think about trying.

mr_yan, i would agree that your beans/rice concoction should digest in time with the methods suggested. I would like to toss in a thought here which has worked well for me over the years.

Worms like moldy foods so I collect the daily kitchen scraps and dumb them into a diaper bucket which I purchased for a quarter at some good will store. I water blend and trench my indoor bins, feeding 1/2 a bin each day. The first thing I do is to fill a blender half full of water before adding a couple of hands full of food scraps from the diaper pail. I use a pair of Dollar General black kitchen gloves to do this since the food mix is pretty soft and sloppy. I blend a few seconds, add a couple more hands full and a little more water, and blend again. I let this mix sit a minimum of fifteen minutes before adding to the trench previously dug. In most cases I will even let it sit overnight, possibly blending several more times in the process.

Once this blended food is added to the trench along with some coffee grounds and several scoops of new media (soaked and aquarium net drained peat moss in my case), I mix it all together with a hand fork, and cover it up. By the time I dig a new trench on the opposite side of the bin, this blended mass of food has all but disappeared. And, I am careful to keep blended food out of the corners of these bins, Reason being, if I find large numbers of worms in the corners while trenching, more than likely there may be a problem.

I am curious about statements about food heating up in the bins. I have never experienced this condition unless I created the problem myself with the heating pad used under my bins in the winter. I am not sure what I'm doing that's different...possibly it's the way I feed?????

mraider3, it sounds like you don't add much food (high nitrogen stuff) at once if you do daily feedings. I have noticed some heating effects but nothing hot like when you dig into a large pile of grass clippings and leafs. The times I have found warm spots in my bin is when I do a large feeding and check it after two or three days - like when I added 5 pounds of pears or half a gallon of thawed tomatoes at once. If I remember correctly the nitrogen is the main food source of the microbes and adding a lot of nitrogen rich stuff can cause a microbe population bloom.

As you have said everyone's bin is different. Some people around here are so focused on heating that I don't understand it.

Anyway if you have a fullish bin I don't see how a normal sized feeding will cause dangerous heating effects. The worms simply have enough space to escape to avoid temps they don't like. Just don't add a lot of "green" material at once relative to the amount in your bin.

I don't see how anyone could overheat a bin through microbial action without also overfeeding it to an extreme.

You hear of a lot of people killing their bins with overfeeding but has anyone ever starved a worm population to death?

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Today I had about three quarts of kitchen scraps thawed out and mixed in about 1.5 cups of my rice & beans. To this I mixed about an equal volume of cross cut shredded newsprint. After this was all mixed I spread it across half the top of my worm inn and topped with more shredded newsprint.

"has anyone ever starved a worm population to death?" I remember a story I read somewhere that went something like a lady checked on her husbands unfed worm bins in the basement and there were still worms alive. Her husband whos hobby it was had passed away 5 years earlier. Maybe someone else remembers it more accurately. He must of fed and put bedding in the bins real good before hand. I am surprised when people post they feed and days later the food is all gone. But then again I feed mine whole everything.

Mine get fed mostly "whole" food. Sometimes it's aged, sometimes frozen (I just add straight from the freezer to the top of my bins, no thawing) sometimes it's wrapped in newspaper burrito style. Frozen goes faster than raw. Aged faster than fresh.
I would probably mix the beans and rice into the top layer - it kind of clumps.

From what I am hearing I would conclude that compaction of media and/or food has a big part in heating up an indoor compost bin. Mine get neither. The blended food is mostly water and I rotate feeding one side of one bin each day. The side which I trench feed is mixed down about two thirds of the way piling the loosened material to the opposite side of the bin, and then I take one half of the trench and loosen it clear to the bottom of the bin. By turning each tub 180 degrees after trench feeding and covering it back up, I am always working on the right side. This may sound strange, but it works for me, and temperatures remain fairly constant throughout each bin, even using a heating mat underneath in the winter.

Part of the reason I do this on a daily basis rather than once a week, is because I use young worms chopped for fish food. The process takes about thirty minutes, but I multitask with other unrelated activities as well.

My outdoor bins will occasionally give off some steam when turning them in the winter, but I like to give them a turn or two weekly in nice weather. I frequently water them as well and even with fresh manure, I have had no problems with adding red wigglers to these bins.

Keep in mind I live in the North and days over 100 degrees are infrequent, and when the sun goes down temperatures will drop 20 or more degrees.

I tend to overheat mt bins by looking at them. A quart of food a one time is a lot, unless you have a largish bin.