I'm aware of a few potential causes for feeding problems (temperatures being too cold or too warm, desire to reproduce, shedding and sickness). I'm having problems feeding both of my Eastern garters now and I hope they are not sick. I haven't found anything the fits in the other threads.

The larger one (a male that I've had for a year [don't know his age, but he hasn't grown that much in the past year]) was a very regular eater from last fall to last spring. Every other day, I would feed it two nightcrawlers and it would take them quickly, and whenever I would offer him a third one, it would take it too. Then, early in the summer, it shed for the last time and since then it has been a very irregular eater, often going a week or more without eating. Since it doesn't seem to have lost weight, I wouldn't be that worried about it except that it's a departure from what was normal. It has also been a long while since it's last shed. At first I thought the temperature was too warm during the summer, but it hasn't been that warm in over a month and the feeding hasn't gone back to normal. I tried to add fish to it's diet (haven't tried pinky mice yet, and I would like to avoid them), but as soon as the frozen/thawed fish entered the terrarium it started acting wary, testing the air for the source of the smell. When it saw the fish, it backed away from it and when I tried to wiggle the fish in front of it, it faked a couple of attacks on my hand (it's never done that before). Feels like it's had a traumatic experience with a fish before....

The smaller one (probably a female [but I have yet to take a good picture to get a confirmation]) I've only had for a couple of months and she's still in her quarantine terrarium. Two weeks after I got her, she started accepting nightcrawlers. She would take one night crawler every other day and everything was nice and regular. That lasted for a while, but then she started puking parts of the worms out after a few hours or a day. I thought the worms I was giving her might be too big since the ones in that batch were a bit bigger than the ones before, so I started cutting them in half, but the puking continued (now the whole half was puked). Then it hit me that maybe it was a uvb issue, so I gave her a brand new bulb, but the problem continued or rather, if I remember correctly, she just stopped eating, so I thought maybe the temperatures had cooled enough that she was missing a basking light (it would have bee ridiculous to use one this summer, here), so I added one. She still refuses worms and she's alarmingly thin and listless. I've managed to feed her a few guppies, but I don't know how long that will last, because getting her interested in the frozen/thawed guppies is actually kind of difficult.

I don't know her age either, but she's quite small. If you follow the rule that the snake must not be longer than the length + the width of the terrarium, then her ten gallon aquarium is a decent minimum for her, with a tiny bit of room for growth. It's rather bare, though (it's still a quarantine terrarium), but it's not any more bare than some of what I've seen as permanent garter snake enclosures. She doesn't have any signs of sickness that I can see and she doesn't have a mite problem. She also seemed to be in perfect health when I got her. Could she have been turned off worms by the weeks of eating and puking them?

Is it possible to force feed a garter snake?

Also, how do you guys vary your snakes' diets if you don't give them pinky mice? Worms and fish seems kind of limited... not to mention that guppies and platies make for an expensive staple....

Any help with this would be appreciated. I'm rather scared the smaller one will die.