Compost: How To Make And Use It

Compost is the lifeblood of our garden soil and if these posts don’t convince you of that… Well, I’ll have to add more. 🙂

• How To Make Your Own Grow Bags of Compost
  Yes, you can use old pantyhose or garbage bags, fill with soilless mix and grow your garden in them. Here’s how. OK, so it’s silly season in the greenhouse research area. Use Old Pantyhose Some researchers have taken old nylons (looks to be about that size anyway) filled them with compost and started growing in them. Their results indicate ...
• Biochar research on soil moisture and fertility
  This biochar research is interesting. Soil scientist Jeff Novak at the ARS Coastal Plains Soil, Water and Plant Research Center in Florence, S.C. is the lead researcher to evaluate the effects of biochar on soil moisture and fertility. There are multiple locations across the US involved in this. Several different kinds of organic matter – ranging from ...
• How To Build an Easy Compost Bin
  Have a better garden with an hour of easy work Image by at Pixabay Building a compost bin is an easy chore for an hour in the garden and you’re smart to be thinking of building it yourself. Most of the commercially made bins are too small to support an active compost system that heats up. They simply ...
• Why I Don’t Recommend Mushroom Compost
  Mushroom compost is, in my opinion, one of the most over-hyped gardening products on garden shop shelves Let’s examine the data. How Are Mushrooms Grown They’re grown on compost made specifically for this purpose.This compost is made by mushroom producers from material such as hay, straw, corn cobs poultry and horse manure Or any combination of organic material that is 1) inexpensive and ...
• What Can You Compost?
  What mixture to use. The bottom line is that anything that was once alive can be composted. Some things, however, are best avoided, because they attract vermin and create problems within the compost cycle. These would include meat and dairy products. While some experience is necessary, what you’ll find in practical terms, is that an equal amount ...
• Herbicide Residues in Purchased Compost or Manure
  If you’re purchasing your compost or manures (or even topsoil) be aware that herbicide residues do exist and can create conditions that restrict the growth of plants. For example, aminopyralid is registered for a wide variety of crops and has created enough problems in the UK to have its registration pulled (technically Dow asked to have ...
• Nine Practical Tips for Making Worm Compost
  Worm compost or vermiculture is one of the most interesting ways of creating compost that I’ve played with. I particularly like it because compost made this way has a higher nitrogen value than regular compost and is a more balanced source of both beneficial bacteria and fungi than regular compost. By using this material in ...
• Do Coffee Grounds and Mosquitoes Get Along?
  I’m a big coffee drinker and fan of really great coffee so I’m always on the lookout for a use for coffee grounds. For example, I know worms treat them like candy and prefer them to most other foods (I have worm farms). And I know that caffeine is a great slug killer but coffee grounds ...
• Should You Use Worm Bin Leachate In Your Garden?
  If you have a worm compost bin you might want to consider using the leachate at as a foliar spray. FYI: The “leachate” is the liquid that sometimes accumulates on the bottom of the bin if you don’t have enough absorbent material in the bin. Researchers in India report that worm leachate applied as a foliar spray ...
• Fungicidal Activity of Compost Teas In The Flower Garden
  There has been a great deal of information running around about the efficiency or lack of with compost tea and fungus. Does it kill it? Or not? Researchers in Canada have tested compost teas made from various types of compost for anti-fungal properties. Doug notes: This is a study from 2010 and I’ve rebuilt it from the ...
• Why Soluble Fertilizers Wreck Your Soil
  Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizers Deplete Soil Nitrogen‚ Organic nitrogen and carbon exist naturally in soils but in the 1920’s and 30’s, research showed that soluble nitrogen fertilizers actually depleted soil nitrogen. This story changed in the latter part of the 20th century as farmers were told the soluble nitrogen fertilizers actually increased soil nitrogen and carbon levels. Once ...
• Compost Tea Recipe With Easily Followed Instructions
  Update: April 2017.  Research has convinced me the average home compost tea has almost no benefit with leaf applications for disease control other than sheer luck. It’s all about how good the tea is made and the average home brewer – contrary to the Internet – simply doesn’t produce good tea on a reliable basis. Even though ...
• Three Steps to Making a Compost Pile and a Confesson
  A compost pile is often built up in a specific way to be effective and here are a few of the guidelines. The first is that the minimum size for effective “hot” composting is 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet tall. Anything smaller than this will not heat up enough to kill off bacteria ...
• Why You Don’t Need a Compost Thermometer
  Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first. Do you need a compost thermometer? And the answer (drum roll please) is not if you’re composting at home. If you’re a commercial compost maker, then perhaps you have a need for one but then again, you already know that. Home Gardeners Need To Know… If you’re a home ...
• How To Make Compost
  So how do you make compost. In practical terms, you need an almost equal amount of green to brown to get a good compost pile working.  And you need a large enough mass to get it “working”. Again, in practical terms there are two kinds of composting-cool composting and hot composting. Cool composting Cool composting is the easy way.  ...
• Vermicompost and Tomato Seed Germination
  This is a fascinating bit of research into vermicompost and tomato seed germination rates of tomato (and lettuce seeds) (and subsequent growth) when the seeds were soaked for 24 hours in vermicompost water extracts. The concentrations of the extracts used were 10%, 5%, 3%, 1% (1:10, 1:20, 1:33, and 1:100 vermicompost-to-water ratio by volume), and 0% ...
• Compost Tea vs Manure Tea vs Compost Leachate
  One of the things we have to get straight here is our definitions of what we’re talking about when we talk compost tea. So here’s what happens when you don’t make compost tea but rather these other systems. In simple terms, compost tea is an extract of compost where the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and beneficial nematodes ...
• Three real uses of coffee grounds in the garden
  Coffee grounds and gardening might not seem like a match made in heaven as there’s some evidence to show that we should be using this very abundant waste product in our gardening efforts. And most of us have lots of this product so here’s how to work both ends against the middle and use this product. The ...
• Don’t Buy Compost Accelerator. You Already Have It
  A compost accelerator is sometimes sold to gardeners to help speed up the rate of composting. This is advertised as a great blend of bacteria and fungi to make your compost pile activate very quickly. Advertising is a wonderful thing. 😉 It Works If… These products work if the compost is being properly made- i.e. it is the ...
• How To Build an Easy Compost Bin
  Building a compost bin is an easy chore for an hour in the garden and you’re smart to be thinking of building it yourself. Most of the commercially made bins are too small to support an active compost system that heats up. They simply don’t have the necessary volume to do the job. Minimum Size for Hot ...
• Can You Brew Pest Killing Fungi Yourself
  For some time now, the big commercial pest control folks have produced specific fungi to attack insects such as whiteflies etc on commercial crops (mostly big ag crops such as grains). The fungi are grown on moist grain, develop, propagate and then the fungi are distributed in the crop to kill off the insect pest. ...
• The Cure for Replanting Problems is Ripping and Compost
  Now here’s something you can adapt to your own garden that we’re taking right from a commercial source. There’s a very real problem with planting similar plants in areas that have had those plants in them (but died). So if you replant roses in the same area where one died or apple trees in an old ...