How to keep and store food scraps for worm composting

I cannot believe that I am typing this, but one thing I missed over the past 2 years was our worms!  They are just so amazing at eating our scraps and giving us beautiful and rich compost.  Managing a worm composter is almost easier than a conventional compost bin… seriously.  

This time I wanted to give our 1000+ new best friends a strong start and also a quick one, so I began saving food scraps in a glass jar in the freezer before they even arrived.   It filled up fast.  Now what? I don’t know about you, but I just did not want to take the time to cut all the peels, etc into tiny pieces, which the wiggly things can consume easier.  One day after cooking I saw my dirty food processor sitting on the counter.  Hmm… it’s already dirty.  Why not use it?  I threw all of the peels, stems, and veggie ends in and gave it a whirl.  Niiiiice.  Perfect.  It wasn’t yet feeding time, so I put that back  into the glass jar and in the freezer it went.  

(Yes, it looks nasty.  Can you tell I had been processing lots of kale from my garden?)

On feeding day I simply placed the jar of frozen scraps on the counter until it was thawed enough to scrape out.  Oh man! I cannot even begin to tell you how FAST they ate it up!  Now, not only can I store more in my glass jar, but I can get them to eat more of our food bits!!!  And faster!!!  

Because they go thru chopped up bits quickly, I have virtually no flies now too.  Bonus.  If you can keep your worms indoors you should not have fly issues at all but, if you are like me and have kids and a puppy that love to peek in on their little friends, you will keep them outside in a sheltered location.  As long as the food is eaten in a reasonable length of time and you keep it covered, you should also not have problems outside.  I always cover the new food with 1-2 layers of newsprint, preferably printed using soy ink. 

(Yes, my worms live in my messy garage...the main place in this house left to unpack and properly organize.  There's something about garden season that makes us just ignore the mess in this space.  Hopefully we'll get to it by winter.  But wait, neighbors tell us we can keep growing things almost all through the winter here.... uh-oh!)

Do you vermicompost?  Do you want to?  Leave your tips, tricks or questions in the comments.  I'd love to hear from you!