Composting Articles
Composting Articles When you come right down it, the practice of composting is little more than speeding up and intensifying natural processes. Click on the composting articles below to learn more about converting yard, garden and household waste into soil nourishing compost.
How to Build the Perfect Compost Bin -
When horticulturists at the University of California Cooperative Extension set out to design the perfect compost bin, they wanted one that was simple to build, easy to use, and efficient at making compost. The bin shown here meets those criteria.
Worm composting -- also known as vermiculture -- is the proverbial win-win situation. It gives you a convenient way to dispose of organic waste, such as vegetable peelings. It saves space in the county landfill, which is good for the environment. It gives worms a happy home and all the free "eats" that they could want.
Brewing Compost Tea - Gardeners all know compost is terrific stuff. But there's something even better than plain old compost, and that's compost tea. As the name implies, compost tea is made by steeping compost in water. It's used as either a foliar spray or a soil drench, depending on where your plant has problems.
Home Composting - Decomposition is at least as old as the soil. The earth itself, as the poet Walt Whitman suggests, is something of a compost pile. "It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last." Long before there were people around to observe it, composting was going on in every forest, every meadow, every swamp, and bog, and prairie, and steppe in the world. As Richard Langer says, "Composting is a natural process that began with the first plants on earth and has been going on ever since."
Hot Composting - Active, hot composting is a BATCH process. It differs from passive piles that just "sit there" seemingly forever or "continuous flow systems" where stuff is periodically dumped on top of the material already in the bin and removed from the bottom when it is dark and crumbly.