Every now and then someone will start a thread about their worms' favorite foods. Horse manure, pumpkin and watermelon all get high votes. Have you made any worm food mistakes? Since nearly all of us do something wrong at first, I thought it might be fun to share our worm's least favorite foods: the foods we wish we had not fed to the worms.

I have two.

Crab apples. I was looking for something to feed the worms, and found a bunch of crab apples on the ground under a tree. Weeks later they still had not broken down at all. I finally pulled them out and ran them through a meat grinder. They still took a long time to break down.

Rice. I got some bugs in some rice in the pantry, so I fed the rice to the worms. It got hot and stunk. It also grew a lot of mold that sucked the moisture out of the bedding. This is the one time I nearly killed my worms. I pushed all the bedding over to one side, then put fresh bedding in the other side to give the worms a place to escape to. It took some time, but the rice finally got to a stage where the worms would eat it. After that, I added only small amounts at a time until it was all gone.