Made a connection with a kombucha manufacturer. They can give me:

tea leaves
Lavendar petals
Hibiscus flower
Spent hops
Powdered orange peel
Scoby trimmings

However, she noted that anything that sat in the kombucha would have a pH of 2.8-3.5.

So, is there a way to mediate that low pH? Is it necessary?

Any red flags in the ingredients? Usually you don't use citrus in vermiculture due to limonene but powdered orange peel?

I do know that hops are toxic to dogs and there have been deaths. However, my dog will never be in that part of the yard. Once broken down they shouldn't be an issue.

Has anyone used SCOBYs in vermiculture or composting? Several people mention their worms and black soldier fly loving to eat SCOBYs but little on how much you can feed whether you need to buffer the pH etc.

I figured I'd update.

1) The kombucha waste is nowhere near as acidic as I had originally been informed. In fact, the SCOBY ("symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) is pure worm crack. They LOVE it. Always cover it though or it dries out before the decomp really gets going.

2) NOTHING...and I mean NOTHING likes hops. It even has a tendency to slow down decomp for materials surrounding them. Since that part of making kombucha is a separate step, you can easily avoid it. I even tried composting it as Bokashi. Not worth it. I also created a separate pile just for the hops. Not worth it. It might be the high oil content.

3) A pretty good kombucha culture has a nice thick healthy SCOBY. They get trimmed frequently to keep it growing...much like rejuvenation of sourdough culture. That said, when you get a lot of it, it looks like hog fat trimmings if you've even been around a hog butchering. The smell is slightly like an apple cider vinegar. That goes away quickly and really isn't unpleasant.

4) Everything else is pretty much tea leavings and any spent leaves of flavoring herbs like mint, lavender, hibiscus, etc. The piles like it and so do the worms and black soldierfly larvae eventually.

Below is a pic of a tub with SCOBY trimmings, then a few shots of the tops of my compost bins with a new layer of SCOBY. I'm looking for a coffee source for my next layer.

BTW, the red looking stuff is from hibiscus flowers.

Glad the kombucha waste is working out well.

Did not know hops are so 'decomposing resistant'. Might be good for something else in the garden though. Thanks for sharing.

Wow, that's really cool. Great job on keeping the cycle going. How often are you getting this stuff? And how much?

For the hops, if nothing likes them, could you use them as a weed mulch?

Most of my pickups are weekly though the kombucha pickup might run two weeks depending on where they're at in production. I'm still at a standstill on coffee. I need that badly right now.

I grab hundreds of bags of leaves each fall. I get roughly three cases of 15 dozen eggshells each week. All combined, the kombucha waste runs about 10+ gallons sometimes a lot more. In the fall I get tubs and buckets and fill the car with fresh spent brewworks grains. I get as much of that as I can handle and cover within a day or two. I keep going until I have nothing left to cover it with. I also trench compost spent grains in every bed I'm not using for winter food production.

That looks great! I would absolutely use that, or any other organic matter I can find. The juicy stuff disappears so fast!

As luck would have it, a small coffee shop opened about 2.5 blocks from me. They jumped at my offer to haul away spent coffee to feed worms. I picked up my first 5 gallons yesterday and they say they can generate about 5 gallons of spent coffee grounds a day (open 6 days a week, off on Mondays). So, I'm excited to get that aspect going again.

I have half of the back garden under demolition at the moment. Once I'm done there should be one large 2.5-3 foot deep hole. Needless to say, once ya have a hole ya gotta fill it. So, I'll be ramping up my sourcing come fall. Until then, I have my normal pickups.

I'd love to find a juicer shop that uses organics and is willing to save pulp.

Does anyone else have sources they use that I might have overlooked here?

I once got vegetable department 'cleanup' from an organic market. I always want the trimmings when the grocery store is tidying their produce for display, but assume ' they' won't want to bother.