bump it down.....guess no one's lazagna bedding this season. All the cardboard is gone but those really cool plant stands are still waiting to go to recyle. Wish I could think of something to re-do them into, such a waste. I did spay paint a couple, one purple and one gold and hung them on the wall as yard art. They look pretty cool.

the brown corigated cardboard boxes are a favorite of worms from all I've read and been told by professional worm growers in the area. Animal based glues provide proteins that are a food source for the microbes that the worms eat. Cardboard (as opposed to paperboard like cereal boxes) also makes a fluffy bedding with lots of spaces for air and worms but it is good at regulating moisture. Biggest problem I've had with corigated cardboard is, the time and effort involved in shredding it up. Most personal paper shredders will give up if you feed them too much of this stuff, we have broken two already and we even pealed the cardboard apart before shredding. If you soak a cardboard box in water overnight, it will rip apart easily and will even make it easy to peal the plastic tape off of it. as to the glossy paperboard, it will be slower to decompose but it eventually does. The only worry some people have is that we don't know exactly what is in the colored glossy surfaces and worm casting is rather concentraited stuff. If there is anything in those colored inks that could be dangerous, it will be concentraited and who knows what will happen if you use it on your veggie garden. I don't know that I really worry about this. I shred all paper/cardboard and use in in my big compost pile. I don't want to use lots of it for my new worms but I'm not going to toss a whole batch of shredded paper just because one cereal box got into it. Please, if anyone has info on the regulations for inks on paperboard and their toxicity or lack there of. Tell us. I know that newsprint in North America is safe and nontoxic now even the colored inks but I don't know about other inks.

Fresh leaves are sources of 'N' in a compost pile but dried leaves are sources of 'C' so would be more like bedding material. If you were intentionally trying to get a hot compost pile to heat up it's unlikely that you could get any significant heat without at least a couple cubic yards of material. In a worm bin it's unlikely that you can get it that hot, even if you were trying to cook your worms. What is more likely is that it gets somewhat hot and they die from other problems. The heating is caused by bacteria multiplying and respiring oxygen at such a pace that there is noticable heat increase, if done right it can reach in excess of 150F. I filled a tray in my worm factory with a LOT of cut up melon and dry leaves just to see what would happen. The temp got as high as about 92F in the top tray or so but never broke 100F. The worms stayed mostly in the trays below for a while but some moved up in the hot tray to eat some melon. Not saying this is good practice, I was just curious to see what would happen and I have multiple bins going to re-seed just in case. The lower trays did not suffer much from the heat but they got a little damp from all the melon.

If you type in COLORED INKS in the SEARCH box at the top of the Forum page, you'll be presented with 7 instances of posts on that topic with 68 responses...including one of your's with reference to the toxicity in colored inks in newsprint (it isn't). More on the SEARCH topic is in the post "What this forum desperately needs.....FAQ... just below this one today. A pretty good topic to RESEARCH would be KELLY SLOCUM if you wanted to get all the really good poop (pardon the pun) without having to put up with people like me who sometimes lead you to the info you want along a very winding path littered with, some say, a different perspective and warped sense of humor. Chuckiebtoo