Your bedding looks good. Maybe a little on the dry side, but it is hard to tell from a picture. Wet cardboard separating is normal. Add food now. Give it a chance to break down a bit before the worms arrive.

I think that is what bedding is supposed to look like. Egg carton is easy and FUN to tear apart while reading garden web posts. Corrugated cardboard can be put in whole and then when damp torn up. Rather then water, the juice of the vegetables can be used to moisten the bedding, even slowly as it leaks out of them.

Possibly your bin will arrive with residents? If so they no doubt (I can see these things.) arrive food rich and bedding poor. So it is great you have bedding ready for them. Idealy the bin will arrive with worms and a quantity of their previous bin material. You may want to did into some forest ground and put a handful of that into your bin.

What you see in the picture is your friend. Any problems with the bin and toss more in. Keep a large container of dry bedding ready to add in frequently.

Thanks for the quarter.

thank you for the replies - the bedding was pretty moist and i'm keeping it moist until the worms are added - i was mostly concerned about the size of the particles and the separating of the cardboard. i've got a small bin i keep adding tp/pt rolls, egg cartons etc. to so that i'll have plenty of bedding on hand at all times

should i be adding paper as well or is misc cardboard alone ok?

I added a small handful each of compost and commercial worm castings to help introduce some microbes

i've been saving kitchen scraps for about 10 days and places a bag in the freezer and will thaw soon and puree before adding

Cardboard is better than paper. Paper will work if you are short on cardboard. I would go with just cardboard unless you can't find enough.

Don't bother to puree! Let the worms have their fun. Be sure it's fully thawed and not freezing cold though. Good luck, sounds like you've done some great planning.

I gave it to my worms frozen. They never complained.

Sbryce, how would you control the moisture in your bin by putting in frozen chunks of food?

I freeze my food as well, thaw and really drain well in the colander, then feed.
I've been grinding unfrozen food lately to see if it gets devoured any quicker, and I don't find that it does, so I'll go back to freezing the food. Either way, it means storing bags of food in my freezer, or in a container in the frig.

Magically the amount of moisture contained in kitchen scraps equals the amount of moisture needed to moisten dry cardboard bedding. Also the nutrients in the juice of the vegetables and fruit is exactly what the microbes need to begin breaking down the bedding.

By the standard most people on this forum go by (very little moisture draining) my bins usually had too much moisture.