Every year our little display of Oriental Lilies gets better. They give us so much pleasure, fill the garden with beautiful scent, and each year there are more of them. The downside is that most years the…
Plug plants are seedlings or rooted cuttings, sold in trays or ‘flats’ containing multiple young plants in their own individual cells. Growing plants from plugs is quicker and more straightforward than growing them from seed or your…
Whether you’re tending frequently to a fast-working hot compost heap, or leaving a slow, cold compost pile breakdown at a leisurely pace, you need to be able to recognize when decomposition is complete. What does finished compost…
Are you sure you’re recycling everything you possibly can on your compost heap? After all, the more material you put in, the more black gold you’ll get out later! As a rule of thumb, everything that is…
A healthy, efficient compost pile should have very little odor. And the finished compost should smell sweet and earthy when you dig it out. If your pile has a nasty smell that hits you before you even…
Composting wood chips and shavings is a little trickier than composting softer materials, but it can be done. If you have a surplus of woody material from animal bedding, pruning trees and shrubs in your yard, or…
Your compost pile is just sitting there. Doing nothing. A big heap of all the things you added to it, looking exactly the same as they did the day you dumped them on the pile. You on…
Deciding where to locate a compost pile is an important business. It’s tempting to put your compost pile in an unloved, unused, out-of-sight part of the yard. But you’re probably going to achieve better results if you…
Compost starters and accelerators, alongside activators, rejuvenators, and other similarly-named products are sold with the promise of being able to bring a dormant compost heap back to life. They’re liquids or powders, designed to be incorporated into…
The world of composting has a language all of its own. Green vs brown materials, aerobic vs anaerobic digestion, activators vs accelerants. And of course, hot vs cold composting. In this article, we’re going to look at…
