Old cardboard boxes have found a place in our forest gardening plans as a cheap source of mulch.

We save all our household cardboard and then get a decent amount from our chicken waterer business, but it wasn't enough for Anna, and back in the winter she started wondering where we could get more.

I went around to several local retail stores and found out there is a new policy where stores pack up their discarded boxes and ship it all back to the original warehouse. That put a crimp in our cardboard mulching plans until Kenneth, the super nice maintenance man at the local school where we tried our worm experiment asked if we could use any "pasteboard", which is what some folks call cardboard around this area.

They had a truckload and I started getting more each time I went to pick up the food scraps for the worm bin. I'm not sure what other places do with their waste cardboard, but it might be a good source of mulch if you have a school in your neighborhood.