Compost by the sea

Beach after storms tossed seaweed onto the shore

I watched as the old man picked up seaweed along the beach. He moved gingerly, picking up the seaweed with long tongs, the kind generally used to pick up trash. As he put the seaweed in one of his two five-gallon buckets, I looked up and down the shoreline.

Surely he wasn't trying to clear the beach of all the seaweed?  I was curious and so I

The garden continues

Out in the vegetable garden, the harvest continues on a near daily basis.  I'm currently picking tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, summer squash, and for the first time this morning, edamame.

Edamame as in soybeans.

While the harvest is wonderful, there are a few missing players.  My green beans were a flop.  They were starting to form just as I left town for a week and temperatures during the

The Compost-Heap by Ruth Pitter - A poem

Miss Twigg: The Compost-Heap

I am surrounded by stacks of old gardening books trying to figure out which of hundreds of tidbits and treasures from these old books to include in a one hour presentation I'm putting together.

The question I am pondering is whose pithy little quote about composting to include, as shouldn't every presentation about gardening mention the benefits of composting?

"In the soft, warm bosom of a decaying compost heap..."

I almost didn't see the box tucked behind the flower pot by the front door. Who knows, it may have been there for a couple of days.

But I did finally see it.

Inside was my new-to-me copy of The Complete Book of Composting by J. I. Rodale and staff (Fourth Printing, 1967). Coming in at 1,000 pages plus (if you count the index), it's a hefty tome.

I look forward to the secrets of

The Story of Compost

I feel obligated to tell the story of compost in my garden because too often new gardeners read about how to make compost and decide it is too complicated, too advanced for their level of gardening.

Yes, dear new gardener, it is so advanced that we have mounds and mounts of plant material stacking up all over because people have forgotten how to make compost.  

My apologies for that bit of