A bag of compost at the garden center looks like a gardening product, while the coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, cardboard, and fallen leaves leaving your house look like trash. Put those materials together correctly, however, and you have many of the ingredients needed to make homemade compost without repeatedly buying bags of soil amendment. The…
composting
8 Kitchen Scraps That Actually Belong in the Compost — And 5 That Don’t
Open the average kitchen trash can and you may find the beginnings of next year’s garden soil hiding among the garbage. Fruit peels, vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds, eggshells, and several other everyday scraps are perfectly suited to backyard composting, where microorganisms eventually transform them into a useful soil amendment. The Environmental Protection Agency says home…
Stop Buying Mulch — 5 Free Materials You May Already Have
Mulch is one of those garden purchases that doesn’t seem expensive until you calculate how many bags it takes to cover an entire landscape. A 3-inch layer across a 100-square-foot bed requires roughly 25 cubic feet of material, so even modest gardens can consume plenty of bagged mulch. Yet free garden mulch may already be…
What Happens If You Bury Kitchen Scraps Directly in the Garden?
If maintaining a compost pile sounds like one garden chore too many, you may have wondered why you can’t simply bury your vegetable peels and coffee grounds directly in the soil. It turns out you can—gardeners sometimes call the technique trench composting, in-place composting, or compost pockets. Instead of decomposing organic material in a separate…
Don’t Throw Away Your Dead Plants Yet — Some Could Save You Money Next Spring
By September, plenty of gardens look like they’re ready for the trash pile: brown bean vines, crispy flower stalks, exhausted tomato plants, and annuals that have clearly seen better days. Before you yank everything out and fill the yard-waste bin, however, take a closer look because some of those dead garden plants could reduce what…
Stop Cleaning Up Your Garden This Fall — 7 Things Experts Say You Should Leave Alone
Fall used to mean one thing in the garden: cut everything down, rake every leaf, bag the debris, and leave the beds spotless before winter. Garden experts increasingly recommend something much less exhausting—and considerably better for the insects, birds, soil, and plants sharing your yard. A more selective fall garden cleanup can preserve overwintering habitat,…
Tomato Blight? Don’t Put These Plants in the Compost Pile
Pulling out tired tomato plants is one of those end-of-season chores that seems straightforward: yank the vines, toss them into the compost pile, and turn this year’s garden into next year’s free fertilizer. But if those plants have brown, spotted, yellowing, or dying leaves, adding them to an ordinary backyard pile could be a mistake….
7 Garden Problems You Don’t Want Surviving in Next Year’s Compost
Turning this year’s garden waste into next year’s free soil amendment is one of the best money-saving tricks a gardener can use. But tossing everything you pull, prune, or rake into the pile can also turn home compost problems into next season’s garden problems. It’s generally a good idea for home gardeners to leave out…
Don’t Compost These 7 Plants When You Clean Out the Garden This Fall
Fall garden cleanup creates a mountain of tempting compost material, but not everything that came out of the garden belongs in that pile. Some plants can carry diseases, spread from stubborn pieces of root, or dump a fresh crop of weed seeds into the compost you plan to use next year. That does not mean…
7 Kitchen Scraps That Belong in Compost—and 4 That Do Not
The compost bin can turn a surprising amount of kitchen waste into useful organic matter for the garden. Apple cores, coffee grounds, vegetable trimmings, and even crushed eggshells can all find a second life in the pile, while certain leftovers can create more trouble than they are worth. Knowing the difference keeps composting simpler and…