I put huge quantities of boxes into a large (5'x2'x20') worm bin, and do nothing more than crush them so that they are in contact with the material below. I find that cardboard is one of the fastest things to be consumed in the bin. Within a few weeks, the worms have reduced the boxes to material that is easily mixed with the older beding. I do remove all the metal and tape before putting the boxes in. The cardboard is certainly one of the favorite foods for the worms. I never add any peat, since I have a large enough volume of partially decomposed material for the worms to use.
Renais

As I experiment, I am using less and less peat. I may stop the paper all together as the worms seem to prefer and do better with cardboard. I'm using small tubs thus boxes need to be reduced someway.

I too am observing my worms seem to prefer corrigated cardboard over anything else. Well, they like their caffein as coffee grounds go fast as well ;)

I am beginning to wonder if I need anything other than corrigated cardboard as feed and the majority of bedding. Two tubs of about 95% cardboard seem to be doing as well as any others I have with only cardboard added (water as needed) as it is consumed.

Is corrigated cardboard suitable as the sole feed? For my purposes it is free and clean.

gerry

I to am starting to use almost all cardboard and find the worms really like it. I do throw in kitchen scraps but my wife and I don't produce a lot. I think they will do just fine. There is at least one big outfit that feeds almost exclusivly cardboard.

I do have in interest in raising about 50 adult ENCs a day as feeders. No way do we produce enough kitched scrap.

A benefit to composters might be that they can sustain a larger population with clean cardboard than with scraps alone. With a larger polulation, they can compost their peak load, not average load.

I am experimenting, seems the cardboard fed group will take in scraps just fine.

So I've got a question. How does all this cardboard enter your life? Are you talking cracker and cereal boxes or more like shipping boxes? I don't have much of either at my house but I could probably get friends to save stuff for me.

The grocery store I go to puts the canned and boxed goods on the shelf still in their cut-down boxes. If they haven't been by to restock in a while, there are lots of empty cardboard trays sitting in the shelves. I grab a few of these whenever I go shopping.

ABC store saves and gives away boxes.

My shopping options mostly include paying 9% sales tax and going to Wal-Mart or ordering online and paying a 3% state use tax.

Amazon gets a LOT of my business. :)

HappyHoosier, from what I have read, worms can use paperboard, like cereal boxes, as bedding as long as the finish is rather dull, and not plastic coated and shiny. But worms simply LOVE corrugated cardboard, and can live off corrugated cardboard alone, using the paste that holds the layers together as food, and the paper layers as food and bedding. Corrugated breaks down quickly, and, since it takes up relatively lots of room in a landfill, I feel good about using it for my worms. I also have read that EFs and Euros fed a diet heavy in paper products get a more pronounced yellow striping, but I can't remember where I read that, so it may be a figment of my imagination. My worms do look incredibly happy and healthy with plenty of CC in the bin.

I love using corrugated cardboard! I get my supply from a liquor store down the street. I particularly like the heavy corrugated partitions that they use between the larger bottles. Those go thru my shredder just fine, and for the boxes themselves, I use a ... box cutter, of all things.

Yeah, I just cut up the boxes too. I don't really make the pieces small. They break down pretty quickly as long as they are somewhat torn up. My shredder is an EL Cheapo, and can barely handle newsprint.

Spring of last year I was building a raised bed for tomatoes. The area had heavy Bermuda and Fescue turf before I started, so I put cardboard boxes from the grocery store over the grass to smother it. I then added 18 inches of finished compost and my tomato transplants. The compost was mainly leaves and grass clippings that were about 6 months old. The compost had gotten really hot during the winter and did not yet have any visible earthworm in it. In November after my tomato plants in the bed had died from frost, I was turning over the bed to work in the dead tomato vines and fall leaves so they would rot over the winter.

I was amazed at how many earthworms had moved in from the soil underneath the raised bed. It had been 7 months since I had put the cardboard boxes over the grass turf, and the grass and cardboard were all completely gone. I had used large cardboard boxes from the paper towel and cereal aisles. I layered the boxes 4 thick, so there were 8 layers of unshredded cardboard the worms had eatten in 7 months. I had lapped the boxes over one another well to smother the grass, so there were at least a dozen layers of cardboard in places. A few of the boxes had plastic tape on them, and the tape was the only thing left of the boxes. Every shovel of composted soil must have contained at least 5 or 6 visible earthworms crawling about, so there were likely more that I did not see as I mixed in the leaves. I was not examining it too closely to take a worm census., simply looking for strips of left-over plastic tape from the boxes that I was picking out as I found it.

In the 5 months from last November until the end of March this year, this population of earthworms helped to break down all the leaves and tomato vines. I had piled up 4 feet of leaves and vines in the raised bed. The bed is a circle that is 18 inches deep and 6 feet in diameter. Even with a colder than normal winter in zone 7, the 4 foot pile of had been transformed into the best soil in which I have ever planted anything. This year's tomato vines are now 7 feet tall and laden with tomatoes about to ripen.

My point is that even with the compost that did not many, if any, worms in it, they had come up from the soil underneath to eat every speck of the un-shredded cardboard boxes. In a worm bin with a dense population of worms, I would expect them to eat damp cardboard in very little time at all.

3 Cheers for the WORMS! Hip, Hip, Hooray!

This is very interesting reading about the use of cardboard alone as a bedding/feed for worms. My own hesitation in using it as a sole source of food, is that I saw an analysis awhile back on the quality of plant nutrients from vermicompost based on a number of different worm diets. As can be imagined, what goes in comes out, and the more rich and varied the diet, the more nutritional the resulting compost will be for the plants. For my purposes, paper of bedding based food alone would not be adequate.

Here is a link that might be useful: Worm Composting Guide

Bstruss..I agree with to an extent. Cardboard or paper alone is probably not sufficient to produce the best compost. It has alot of carbohydrate (when broken down)and nitrogen but few of the electrolytes needed.

Where I disagree is that very little 'extra' needs to be added to get some pretty good compost. Coffee grounds offers pottasium and several other elements plus the worms seem to like it. Of course the more varied the diet you might come up with more trace elements but most of these trace elements are already in the soil or is added by other means easily.

I HAVE MOVED MY WORMS FROM A COMPOST EVIRONMENT OF PEATMOSS FOOD SCRAPS AND PAPER. TO A C.CARDBOARD, BROWN PAPER,NEWS PRINT,TOILET PAPER ROLL, ENVIRONMENT FOR 3 OR 4 MONTHS.I HAVE NOTICED MY WORMS ARE LARGER AND DARKER RED COLOR.THEY ALSO APPEAR TO BE MORE ROBUST( SHORT AND FAT) NOT AS STRINGY AND LONG AS THE WERE PREVIOUSLY. I WAS NOT GROWING VERY BIG WORMS, NOW I HAVE SOME ALMOST 4" LONG IN RELAXED STATE AND THEY COULD EASILY STRETCH OUT TO 6".

I have started using shredded cardboard in my bins and I find that the worms really enjoy it. They go through the material really quickly and they grow really big ! I don't think I'll be using anymore coir. I'm going to convert most of my bins to the cardboard bedding.

I always thought it plain stupid to buy coir, peat or any other 'bedding' when most of us are inundated with large amounts of junkmail and scrap cardboard. I would say that this winter, 80% of what went to my worms was paper product. The rest was whatever came out of my kitchen plus some yard waste (leaves etc) that I threw in to fill my tumbler. Worms are doing fine and I am stockpiling excellent quality castings.

I work at a large cancer treatment center and the volume of cardboard here coming in every day is incredible! I already take the paper that they shread here and use it for bedding but I want to get a shredder that can handle cardboard and use some of the cardboard that I can get here.

Wormies can do well with just cardboard but the content of the castings may be impacted. Those who use wormcastings for fertilizers make a conscious decision to feed the worms a wide variety of foods for nutrition content. But worms can and will survive and even thrive on just cardboard, alone. It's all about microbes. Adding a touch of unsulfured black strap molasses adds excellent microbial content (activation) and some protein for the little guys. They really love powdered egg shells for some reason. They probably use it in their gut to help process foods.

I'm so glad to see a thread about shredding cardboard! What brand do you use? Standard office supply store type, 15 sheet? The first poster listed a few specifics. Cross cut cardboard?

I want to use it for feeding the worms directly in my garden beds. The kitchen scraps go directly in the garden and I think fluffy shredded cardboard would be a good addition. I already use lots of shredded leaves and grass clippings. Someday I'll put the worm bins back up, but for now they have to live in the garden beds.

Could you share specifics on your cardboard shredding appliance?

I have created a shredder I use to reduce cardboard for my worms and rabbit nest boxes. See it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9JHbRpwbwQ

I built it myself for $100 from old used parts from other salvaged equipment and a weekend of labor.

Certainly if cardboard is your thing you can get all you want at places like wallmart. I see stacks of it on carts and all I have to do is ask for it. But a lot cardboard is not my thing. I will use some but much more newsprint as it is just easier to handle. As opposed to some others I do add peat to mine as I always have a lot on hand as I use it for plant mixes sometimes. I prefer it over coir as with coir I always find long strands left that doesnt get used come harvest. I usually mix peat, newsprint, coffee grounds, compost, cardboard. But Im always adding newprint as a cover layer for added food.