Anything in the cabbage family gets spit out and tantrums are thrown (cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts). Cranberries also lay untouched. For years.

My worms ate veggies in the cabbage family, but the smell was awful for a few days as it decomposed.

If I add some/most veggies that have not begun to get a little "ripe" they will lay there for awhile until they begin to get "ripe".

If I blend those things with something the wormies really, really get all woody-ed about like pumpkin or cantaloupe or banana peels, they go into those feeding-frenzy squirms that we love.

They just start blindly eating in the hysteria that is worm squirm.

cb2

I had a batch of Red Cabbage that I froze and thawed. It sat in the bin 10 days untouched, until it developed a healthy layer of white mold. Next thing I knew, the worms were all over it.

Shaul

Onions. I'd bury the ends and skins, the worms would push them back out. I'd rebury, and the worms would push them out again. Message received.

Interesting. My worms were fine with onions.

The person who gave me a bucket of worms to start vemicomposting years ago stated onions were the favorite food of his herd. His wormbed was huge, and he dumped scraps from his bakery/restaurant on it daily.

I have not had an onion or other veggie rejection. Kelp, however, took a long time to disappear.

Coffee grounds aren't veggies, but it always amazes me when wormers rave about how much their worms love coffee grounds. I don't even know how anyone can see the grounds in the bins.

Right from the beginning, I never felt my worms cared for coffee grounds. Just as further proof to my thoughts I put a filter of used grounds in the corner of the bin, to see if anyone migrated for a taste. Nope, nada. not a lad in the least bit interested. So I dumped it out of the filter and tore the filter into shreds. So I don't get excited about saving the grounds for the lads, they don't care.

My worms ignored coffee grounds until they started to grow some sort of white mold on them.

x2 on the mold. It takes awhile

I find clusters of worms under where I dump the morning coffee grounds. Not right away, days later, but they seem to like them. Just today, in case things were getting a bit too acidic, I sprinkled a very light dusting of powdered eggshells over the surface and lightly scratched it in.

My worms totally reject potato peelings, which surprised me. Some were in there so long that apparently even the other micro-critters that live there feel the same! I have not tried onion scraps since I read somewhere worms don't like them, and never put citrus in.

They do love tomatoes, but evidently do not eat the seeds. I have learnedto add only cooked tomato stuff after one canning season when I ended up with a veritable jungle of tomato seedlings in the bins. For 2 years seedlings kept popping up in my houseplants since when repotting those I add a little vermicompost to the mix. LOL

As we all know, the wormies eat:

Anything organic and nothing living and food that is either really, really soft (cantaloupe, pumpkin), or pureed, or decomposing.

We also know that except for the really, really soft stuff, what the worms actually are eating on the other stuff is the microbes that are eating it.

I confirmed this one time after having a lot of dental work that left me temporarily dependent on my Waring blender and stuff soft enough to fit thru a straw or be picked up in a spoon.

I didn't look too deeply into the decomposition state of my grub.

And I had teeth....the wormies have none.

Chuckiebtoo

This forum could probably contain books of he likes but she hates. Personally I am finding that there are some things that will disappear in a heart beat and other things lay wasting away. I also find that different bins of worms feed in a variety of ways. I can't get coffee grounds scraped into the bin fast enough for mine but they sling pasta back at me with a vicious snarl. I guess the worms do have taste buds of some kind or another. I puree my stuff in the Nutri Bullet which helps the worms chow down easier.

Part of it is the way it is prepared prior to feeding. Onion peels, potato peels, carrots and citrus all went quickly when I ground them up first and mixed them with other foods. Even banana stems would decompose if ground first. But whole rotten potatoes also decomposed faster than one would expect. I couldn't get myself to put them through the grinder.

I have a big mouth juicer which works well and I put everything in it that I have saved till Im ready to juice. I usually do the fruit first , drink the juice. By saving and then giving to them quickly had the bacteria breaking it down. I usually always cut out banana stems but maybe I could ground up the stems as they would take forever if touched at all.