Feeding citrus peels to worms

Feeding citrus peels to worms? If you do some research on the Internet you will find countless warnings not to any citrus fruit or their peels to your worm bin.

Cautious as I am I followed these suggestions for years and threw them away with my other household waste. But at some point down the line I got fed up having to throw away all those organic materials and letting them go to waste on a land fill site. We must keep in mind that a lot of the natural materials including citrus fruit have a great nutritional value and should therefore be recycled and returned to the earth. Once dumped on a land fill the wet waste usually starts to decompose anaerobically, produce harmful greenhouse gases and pollute the groundwater.

I began to add citrus fruit peels to my worm bins and the worms didn't seem to mind. They waited for a while for the peels to start to decompose and get softer before they moved in to feed on them. But once they began to enjoy

Feeding citrus peels to worms

the lemons and oranges they fed on them steadily. Over a period of time the lemon- and orange peels disappeared and where converted into worm castings.

According to my experiences it is not a problem to feed acidic materials to a worm farm as long as one does it in "moderation"!

In addition it is a great idea to add some things like Crushed eggshells, Gardeners' dolomite, snail shells, mussel-shells (rinsed to remove the salt) to the worm bin to assist in balancing the "pH" levels inside the worm bin!

Nowadays I feed all citrus fruits as well as cat poop to some of my worm farms and never noticed any problem at all! The worms neither died nor did they leave their worm bin.

As mentioned above the secret of feeding citrus peels to worms is to do it in moderation! As long as the worms have enough bedding inside their bin that

they can retreat to without being burnt up it will be just fine!

The worm herd can then just move towards the acidic food eat some of it and move away again! I even fed some of my worms exclusively lemon peels for a while and they finished them off without a problem!

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