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Composting

Easy Composting at Home: 5 Ways to Compost from Hardest to Easiest

A decade or so ago, there weren’t many people looking for ideas for easy composting at home. If you were interested in composting, you either ran a farm or you lived in a coop of recent college graduates who were going off the grid. As appealing as going off the grid might be these days, composting has hit the almost mainstream. You probably won’t find it listed as an amenity at your upscale condo communities, but it’s not unheard of to walk into a well-appointed suburban home and find a compost bin.

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Composting

The Best Plants for Straw Bale Gardening

To talk about the best plants for straw bale gardening, it’s probably important to clarify what straw bale gardening is exactly. The short version is that you can grow vegetables in straw bales just as you would in a raised bed or large container. It’s a popular option in areas where the soil is contaminated or simply not conducive to growing plants.

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Composting

How to Keep Animals Out of Compost Bins

Composting is the gift that keeps on giving. I love turning food scraps, cardboard, grass clippings, and other green and brown materials into a usable and nutritious soil amendment. It saves money and the planet. Not to mention trash day is a lot lighter! With so many ways to compost, finding a method that works […]

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Composting

How to Make Bokashi Compost in 5 Easy Steps

Whenever I get to write about composting, I get that feeling you have when you’ve discovered a great new TV show and want to share all about it with your friends. Basically, compost is my Bridgerton. I feel like I’m constantly learning techniques and methods for composting and each one is more interesting than the next.

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Composting

Is Pine Needle Compost too Acidic for Vegetable Gardens?

Pine needle compost might be one of the most misunderstood areas of composting. Sure, there’s some confusion about whether that take-out container is compostable, but when it comes to pine needles, there’s a longstanding assumption that they are too acidic. 

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Composting

The Lowdown on the Breakdown: A History of Composting Myths and Legends

Are you tired of your garden looking like a desolate wasteland? Are your plants struggling to survive despite your best efforts? Well, have no fear, dear food gardener, because composting is here to save the day! But wait, you may be thinking, “Composting? Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying throwing food scraps in […]

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Composting

5 Benefits of Fermenting Compost for Your Garden

Compost, that black gold of the garden, has a very intriguing inner life. Bacteria, fungi, microorganisms, chemical reactions, and fascinating transformations are all present in the midst of our compost pile. The most common way is through an aerobic process, meaning with oxygen. But there’s another way to get that super-rich source of garden nutrients: […]

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Composting

How to Make Grass Compost in 4 Simple Steps

I have some bad news. All that time you spent raking grass as a kid? You didn’t need to do that. You could have been off riding your bike or playing video games while the grass was turning into grass compost. Sort of, anyway. 

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Composting

How to Make Natural Compost from Everyday Food Waste

Did you know that, according to the EPA, the United States produces more than 42 million tons of food waste every year? That’s 210 cruise ships filled top to bottom, stem to stern, with food. Or for something more relatable, that’s how much 9,333 Ford F-150 pickups weigh, or 14,000 Toyota Priuses. Indeed, learning how to make natural compost isn’t going to eliminate that kind of waste.

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Composting

What to Do When Your Compost Smells Like Ammonia or Sulfur

If you’ve read much about compost, you know it shouldn’t have too much of an odor. And if you’ve been composting for more than five minutes, you also know that sometimes, no matter what you do, your compost smells like ammonia or sulfur. If you haven’t experienced this “lovely” phenomenon, you either will soon, or […]