Composting Info Updates

flowers

Check out this new composting journal and vermiculture guide. It’s the Beta version without a design and a few spelling errors, but it’s still a great resource for those interested in composting with red wiggler worms. The website has a journal which is regularly updated, so check it out.

Even Martha Stewart is working with worms these days.

The Onion has a few tips for getting this year’s gardening season started off right. Here’s a sample to give you an idea what kind of advice you’re in for:

Gardening experts agree that talking to your plants is a great way to exhale carbon dioxide onto them.

They also have some tips for making fool-proof Faustian pacts with your garden gnomes to ensure that your gardenias will be the best of your block. Silly stuff but very entertaining.

Read the rest here!

Plant Thieves will be Composted!

Compost is people! It’s people!

coffee for compost

Spotted this photo on Flickr.

Looks pretty gross on your desk, but your plants will sure like it when it turns into finished compost!

If you had a live Christmas tree this year, you know very well that throwing that tree out in the garbage is not the best way to dispose of it. Thankfully, there are a number of eco-friendly Christmas tree disposal methods to choose from. If you have a chipper shredder, you can use the leftovers in your compost. Many cities offer Christmas tree recycling programs. You can also check out this handy guide to safely getting rid old Tannenbaum. Handy tips abound!

Feeling lazy about going out to the compost bin in the winter? Not to worry, this kitchen compost unit is an excellent gardening tool that allows you to compost (smell-free) from the comfort of your own kitchen! It uses a unique fermenting process to decompose organic material. The kitchen composter is also a great gift for those who live in apartments and who may not have room to set up an outdoor compost bin.

By now your Halloween pumpkin has got to be looking pretty pathetic. But not to worry, you can indeed compost your pumpkin! You can also eat it! While most pumpkins sold for ornamental purposes don’t have the rich flavor of cooking pumpkins, ornamental pumpkins can make a pretty decent pumpkin soup or pumpkin pie. Also, some cities even offer special pumpkin pickup services.

Check out this interesting article about NPK labels on fertilizers. You may be surprised at what they really mean! In fact, you may be surprised to know that compost can greatly reduce the amount of fertilizer your plants actually need! With good gardening practices, you may not need to fertilize your garden at all! Here’s a sample of what the article has to say:

German scientist Justus Von Liebig was responsible for the theory that Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium levels are the basis for determining healthy plant growth. However, this theory, which dates to the 1800s, doesn’t take into account the dozens of other nutrients and elements that are essential to plant growth such as sulfur, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, etc. Nor does the theory talk about the importance of beneficial soil organisms that help your plants to absorb nutrients and fight off pests and diseases.

Compost made from recycled paper apparently has the extraordinary ability to help your plants fight off diseases. Or so says new research by the University of Warwick. A team of researchers working under Professor Ralph Noble has done some interesting experiments recently that give organic gardeners and those who compost a big boost. Ok, my first question is: where the heck is the University of Warwick? In the U.K. Oh, Okey-Dokey. Like all good Americas, I pride myself on my ignorance of other countries. Anyway, back to the compost! Biology New Net reports:

“…..Professor Ralph Noble has recently shown that the use of composts can reduce the incidence of some important plant diseases by as much as 72%. That research, funded by the UK government’s Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP), found that the replacement of around 20% of the volume of soil or peat by compost gave major disease control benefits. Professor Ralph Noble’s latest research appears to add another ecological benefit. Early results from trials with conifers using compost made from paper waste shows that it is providing much the same disease suppressing effect as green compost made from plant waste. This provides an obvious additional commercial use for the vast amount of paper waste generated by offices and homes. “

With these handy leaf scoops, you’ll save hours of labor picking up those fall leaves. These ingenious gardening gadgets fit right on your hands, making them powerful cleanup tools. They measure 14 inches across, giving you plenty of leaf grabbing power. This garden tool is also appropriate for a number of garden cleanup chores, making it ideal for all your fall yard tasks! Use them to scoop up leaves and garden debris directly into your compost bin, too!  They’re economically priced, at $21.95 for two pairs!

With fall just around the corner, it’s not too late to start thinking about how you’re going to collect all those leaves that are about to pile up in your yard. It’s also a good idea to think about what you’re going to do with them! We recommend this handy leaf scoop to pick up the leaves, and this excellent wire compost bin to compost them. Leaves are an excellent source of organic compost, so make sure to recycle them!

Envirolet.com offers waterless composting toilets for the home, plus some other cool products. These composting toilets are great for cabins, beach homes, or even your very own urban household. Save water and help the environment with a composting toilet! Here’s some more info about their products from their website:

Envirolet® Composting Toilets have been sold worldwide since 1977. Sancor™ manufactures and markets Envirolet® factory direct to the consumer. Envirolet® Composting Toilets are designed & engineered around our unique, patented Automatic Six-Way Aeration and evaporation process.

If you’re looking for a basic compost bin made from natural materials, this double cedar composting bin is for you. It has a beautiful and basic design that will hold lots of compost. It has the option of adding screen covers to protect your compost as well. The cedar compost bin is available from Clean Air Gardening.

Compost before you fertilize is the recommendation of the Kansas City Star, which published an interesting article (although very short) on the virtues of compost. They also have a link to a great government website with more information on how to compost effectively.

We’ve recently received comments from readers describing the challenges of composting in tropical areas. Gardeners in the tropics deal with extreme levels of heat and humidity, not to mention lots and lots of bugs that can be attracted to the compost. Thus, I did some research to try and find sources of information on composting in the tropics. I found a pretty well-written site on composting in hot moist areas from Peace Corps volunteers at Michigan Tech University. In addition to a list of recommended techniques, the website has a number of links to other websites dealing with composting in the tropics, plus email addresses of people you can write for advice and more information. Having never made compost in the tropics myself, I can’t vouch for these techniques. However, I would think that if resources allow, a tumbling compost bin would be an excellent option to keep pests out and maintain a good amount of oxygen in the mix. Please leave a comment if you have any other ideas or experiences making compost in tropical areas.

We’ve told you dozens of times about how composting conserves landfill space by recycling organic materials into rich, fertile earth instead of just throwing it away.

But water conservation is important too. If you are using an old showerhead that is from before 1990, I highly recommend that you purchase a new showerhead.

A new showerhead can conserve water, but it also saves you money in two ways.

1. You use thousands of gallons less each year, reducing the amount of water that you are currently wasting with an inefficient showerhead.

2. You reduce your gas or electric bill. What? How? Like this! You are using HOT water to take a shower. That water has to be heated up, and that takes energy. When you switch to an efficient showerhead, you use less electricity or gas to heat the water. And as an added bonus, you get a longer hot shower without running out of hot water since you are using less water with every minute.

I highly recommend this line of showerheads pictured above. I have one at home, and it’s the best showerhead I have ever owned, bar none.

The Bolton Common recently published an interesting article about compost titled Community solutions: Ideas for sustainable living. The article focuses on composting and has some great tips. The column also includes other articles on how energy improvements and lifestyle changes can pay off for you and your family.

The Blossom Swap has a unique collection of gardening t-shirts and apparel to help show off your love of gardening. As a fan of compost, I especially liked this “got worms” t-shirt. This is a great way to promote the culture of composting, which is really the best thing you can do for your garden. You can also wear this t-shirt if you’re a fan of fried worms. Yum!

Community composting is a hit in Montreal, where multiple community bins have been set up recently. Montreal’s “The Chronicle” reports:

Two new community composting bins were installed this spring in CDN-NDG. The bins, one each on Connaught and Madison Avenues, bring the borough’s total to 14. “We believe that composting is something everyone should be doing,” said Geneviève Grossenbacher, director of Valorisateur, a community group that helps manage five of the bins.

In the case of Montreal, the compost created by the communal compost bins goes to use in community gardens. This is a great way to get people more involved in composting and to reduce municipal waste. It’s also a great way to bind people together and create more of a sense of, well, community! If you know of any other communal composting projects, please let us know!

Here’s another story of a happy healthy yard using worms and compost. This time the news comes from the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The article discusses worms, worm castings, “black gold” and includes some basic tips for worm composting.

Question | What materials are needed for worm composting?

Answers | Lilley’s worms labor under her deck, which is screened with removable pieces of latticework. “All it takes is building a home for them and feeding them your leftovers,” she says. A small wooden box filled with shredded newspapers and manure or leaf mold is an ideal way to begin. Build the box where temperatures stay above freezing during winter and below 84 degrees in summer.

The Urban Farmer is a great website to check out for information on gardening and farming in an urban setting.  Urban farming and gardening can be a challenge, especially with the soils that we have to work with.  (Compost is key, I proclaim!) This site is full of great tips to help you overcome the challenges of urban gardening.  Another good place to look for urban gardening tips is Urban Gardening Help. 

This long-handled garden tool set will give you a little extra leverage with your gardening chores. They are ideal for mixing compost, spreading it out, and mixing the compost into your garden soil.  I like the idea of buying garden tools in sets, and this English tool set has great tools that you’ll actually use! The set includes a fork, shovel, and a garden hoe. The tools come from Sorby Hutton, which is famous brand well known for quality tools. They come from the steel working town of Sheffield, England.

The Edie New Center has a great article about how compost can help protect your plants against soil-borne diseases. This means that you’ll spend less time applying chemicals to keep your plants happy. The article actually refers to university studies that prove that plants are healthier and fight off diseases when the soil contains compost. Here’s a excerpt from the article:

But a study commissioned by the Waste & Resources Action Plan (WRAP) looked at recent research into almost 50 types of disease affecting plants and concludes the evidence that compost made from garden or food waste helps suppress all manner of wilts, rots and turf disease is overwhelming. The study was carried out by the University of Warwick’s horticultural research wing, Warwick HRI, and demonstrates that mixing compost into soil or peat to a level of 20 per cent or above enables ‘good’ microbes in the compost to fight off many common pathogens.

Let It Rot! The Gardener’s Guide to Composting, is a wonderful and humorous guide to composting offered by Stu Campbell.  The book came out in 1975, making waves and introducing (reintroducing?) a generation of gardeners to the joys of compost.  This book makes a great gift for friends, relatives, and loved ones. 

While pulling out weeds and playing in the dirt, gardeners sometimes have to look on the bright side of life to keep things in perspective.  Today, we offer a bit of compost-themed gardening humor in the form of quotes by celebrities. Who knew that Hamlet was a gardener?

Ani DiFranco: I’m queen of my own compost heap & I’m getting used to the smell.

Bette Midler: My whole life has been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that let’s you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap.

Hamlet: Confess yourself to heaven, Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come, And do not spread the compost on the weeds To make them ranker.

Read more of these great compost quotes at the Earth Friendly Gardener. 

Looking for some great eco-friendly gardening tips?  Check out the Earth Friendly Gardening Website.  They have some excellent information on organic mulching, which, in addition to composting, is one the best things you can do for your garden beds. 

This blog post from Real Food and Scandalous Gardening Secrets has some excellent information on using worms in your garden.  Most gardeners know that the presence of earth worms is a real blessing for your soil.  However, getting the most out of your worms can take some special tricks of the gardening trade.  The blog post has some great tips for using worms, compost, etc. to get your garden to grow lush and happy.  It also has a ton of very useful links to other great sites on composting, worms, etc. 

Check out this interesting article about growing multiple sequences of vegetable crops in your garden.  That is, growing a batch of early maturing veggies, then planting another batch of veggies that will mature later in the season.  The key, they say, is adding compost to the soil before you plant the second round.  Of course, we knew that already, didn’t we! 

If you’re visiting or live in the San Francisco area, I recommend you look up the folks at Mixt Greens, a eco-friendly restaurant that specializes in salads and sandwiches.  Why?  They serve up organic greens, and their to-go packages are fully compostable! 

It’s no secret that dairy farms produce a lot of waste that could be composted.  That’s why there is a strong interest in putting this manure to use and reducing waste.  Check out this article from the Agronomy Journal for more information on how dairy farmers are improving their operations by composting. 

Hi there Compost Guide Blog readers! If you’ve visited this site over the last few days, you may have noticed something weird going on with the formatting and the posts. We have been experiencing some technical problems with the blog, but it looks like things have been resolved. So, we’re back in action. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Check back later today for more news and info on composting, composting products, and composting news.

Eating Light is an organic deli in Orlando, Florida that has a unique way of doing business. They use organic crops to create their delicious dishes, but when it comes to dumping scraps, they use the organic waste as compost. The compost thus goes back into the system and helps to make this deli a soft self-sustaining organic gardening gig plus restaurant. Cool! If I lived anywhere near this joint, I definitely would eat there!

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an article about gardening on a budget. Not surprisingly, they praise composting as a way to grow healthier plants:

For your soil, the best thing you can do is add organic material such as compost, manure or a cover crop. The cost to compost? Nothing.

Read the full article about composting and other money saving gardening tips here.

Check out this great article by Star Lawrence about how gardening can contribute to your health by allowing you to get exercise and loose a few pounds here and there.  Gardeners know that spending a few hours in your garden every week can really do wonders for your mental health, in addition to your physical health. 

Jeff Restuccio, author of Fitness the Dynamic Gardening Way, is a first-degree black belt but found he was getting more exercise playing in the garden with his kids. “I like gardening because it’s purposeful,” he tells WebMD. “With food so cheap in the stores, you may not save money growing your own, but the chances are, if you grew it, your family will eat it.”

So get out there and start digging! 

The BBC reports that a recent compost bin giveaway in Scotland caused major traffic jams, as people waited in line in their cars for up to 3 hours to receive a free bin.  The giveaway was part of a government program to increase home composting on the island nation. 

This great compost thermometer, available from the Compost Guide Store, will take the guess work out of making your own compost. Knowing the temperature of your compost is an important part of making high quality compost that will benefit your plants. Don’t take chances, make sure you measure your compost’s temperature before you apply it to your garden soil!

This article from the UK’s Sunday Mirror talks about a plan to run buses on cow manure.  They claim that it’s cheaper than diesel and odor-free!  And, as we all know, cows can produce a good amount of cow-patties!  The left over cow patties will be used as compost.  Apparently, India is already using this low-tech fuel for many of their buses.  Another interesting note, the brits refer to cow patties as “cowpats”

This article from North Carolina’s Channel 14 recommends vines as a way to hide a compost pile.  The article has an interesting video of author Anne Clapp planting the vines.  Also, consider an attractive compost tumbler as an alernative to the typical compost pile.  With a compost tumbler, there’s really no reason to hide you compost behind vines or other plants!  A compost tumbler keeps your compost enclosed and away from pests as well! 

Bat Guano is a 100% natural fertilizer that will make the plants of your garden very happy. Bat guano has a high humus content, which makes it an excellent soil builder. Before the advent of artificial fertilizers, bat guano was the fertilizer of choice for many gardeners. Bat guano is also 100% safe for the bats. This bat guano comes from the Bracken Bat Cave in Central Texas.

Umbra Fisk is the Grist Mill’s garden advice guru.  Check out this interesting letter from Umbra about compost from the Grist Mill environmental website.  It deals specifically with what weeds can and can’t go into the compost pile.  Definitely some good tips about composting here. 

Seeds of Change is an organization that works to promote organic gardening. In addition to having a great selection of hard to find garden seeds, they also carry some tools like this super-sturdy trowel. You can feel good about purchasing your garden tools from this great eco-friendly company.

Restaurants produce tons and tons of food waste each month.  That’s why I was happy to read yet another article about restaurants putting their waste to good use by composting.  The Central Valley Business Times reported that 30 restaurants in the Modesto California area will be participating in a federally funded composting program.  The resulting compost will be sold to area locals and businesses. 

 “Thanks to a partnership between the city and local restaurants, a valuable resource will be recycled to enhance our environment instead of being thrown away,” says Jeff Scott, regional director of waste programs for the EPA, in a written statement. “Composting food waste will produce valuable soil amendments rich in nutrients.”

Ok, so this is a little late, but I just became aware that there is a compost awareness week in the UK, which is celebrated from May 7th through the 13th.  Cool!  This article from Let’s Recycle has all the info about this great event.  I don’t think we have anything like this in the U.S., but please drop us a line if you know about the American version of Compost Awareness week.  Cheers!

So I imagine by now you’ve busted out your lawn mower and have started the yearly ritual of blasting down that patch of green in your front yard. You know, standing behind a raging motor, breathing in the delicious fumes, bagging up the grass clippings, etc., etc. Well, ladies and gents, I’m here to tell you about Grass-Cycling! That is, leaving the grass clippings on the lawn. GASP! Blasphemy! “Why would I want to do that?” you say. Well, according to this government website about Grass-Cycling from the city of Philapdelphia, there are plenty of good reasons.

DID YOU KNOW: that a 40 by 100 foot lawn produces about 1,200 pounds - nearly 50 bags - of grass clippings each year? Think of the time, money, and effort it takes to bag all those clippings. Why go through all that hassle when it’s not necessary? Furthermore, you throw away $75.00 of your tax money with those 50 bags because of unnecessary collection and disposal costs. You can have a healthy green lawn and lower your City’s expenses by leaving grass clippings where they fall.

Also, another thing to consider is trading in that gas-guzzling power mower for an eco-friendly reel mower. Using a reel mower means less noise, less pollution, and less money spent on gas

Just read this interesting article about a company called PayGro.  They just got a big grant to work on transforming cardboard food packaging and food scraps into compost from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and other sources. 

Now, Paygro processes about 13,000 tons of compost per year. With the new equipment, it should compost an additional 5,000 to 5,500 tons in food waste. The company has contracts with Dole and Rumpke Recycling and is looking at adding contracts with area colleges, Chaney said.

You can read the full article about PayGro’s recycling and composting project here. 

Ok, so I do a little gardening now and again, but I would never say that I’m a serious gardener or that I know lots of tips to keep my plants alive. That became painfully obvious when I read this article about the inner workings of an organic farm. In the article, they talk about how there are more than five colors of carrots out there to grow, and how red plastic mulch can help tomatoes and strawberries by intensifying the light from the red end of the color spectrum. Oh yeah, and how silver mulch can deter squash bugs. So, if you’re looking for gardening advice, definitely don’t ask me. Talk to a professional instead! I thought all carrots were orange…

Check out this article about decorative ceramic compost pots. These are beautiful, functional pieces of art that will allow you to create high quality compost for you garden.

The Radio Flyer Classic Red Wagon is not only a great toy for kids, it’s also a tough work horse in the garden. This classic design hasn’t changed in 85 years! It’s safe for kids, and it’s built to last! Get your kids to help out in the garden.  With this little red wagon, you can haul compost, mulch, plants, and a lot more!

MasterGardener.com offers Wet Stop gardening gloves. Wet Stop gloves are ideal for protecting your hands and keeping them dry while gardening. You can perform a huge variety of garden tasks with these durable, well built gloves.