Magazine pages as bedding

Would Magazine pages soaked in water be a suitable bedding, or would the gloss on the pages be bad?

NO! Ah sorry, no. Slick and colored paper is a no no.

I just spent the whole day sorting colored paper out of my worm bin. Whole day, dawn to dark, 11 hours an only got half done.

I should have known better, well i did but i was short on paper for the new bin and the worms were due the next day. That was 8 months ago. So i cheated a bit and added just a tiny bit of slick magazine paper and a lot of pages from a phone book to top the bin off.

I should have left the bedding a little low. The first time i harvested the bin there were big clumps of paper in the finished compost. I noticed that all the paper was colored or slick stock. Everything else around these clumps had composted down nicely. However the clumps were just full of baby worms and eggs so i transfered them into the top bin in my stack for further composting.

Well today i harvested that bin again. The clumps looked just like they did the first time i harvested. Not wanting to see them for a third time I ended up having to open up every little bit of paper and separate out all the eggs and newly hatched worms. The paper was still in such good shape that i could still read the phone numbers from the phone book and see the photos from the magazine. And this was on bits of paper no more that an inch wide to begin with and had gone through the bin twice.

The worms were in very good shape moving quick and breeding the bin smelled good so the inks weren't making them sick but my whole point in keeping worms is to make compost and the paper wasn't composting.

Thanks for the reply. In my bin the colored and slick pages broke down slightly slower than the newspaper, but not so slow that it was a problem in itself. I've stopped putting that type of paper in my bins because I think the heavy metals in the ink were the downfall of my bin.

Thanks