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Re: Compost!

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

Cottonseed meal is not accepted by most organic certification programs
unless it is from organically grown cotton, the reason being that cotton is
one of the world's most heavily sprayed crops and the meal from non-organic
cottonseed carries a lot of pesticide residue...

Peaceful Valley carries organic cottonseed meal, but I would hesitate to
poney up the bucks to use this material in the compost pile.

Many studies show that finished compost is always about the same C:N
ratio---adding N to the pile may give you a slightly larger finished pile,
but if excess N is present it may be volatilized as ammonia, and lost.....

For the greedy crops it is best to add the N source to the planting rather
than the compost....

Alfalfa meal can be purchased from feed mills, or you can use rabbit
pellets, horse pellets, or other alfalfa products....as always, caveat
emptor, check the ingredients for vermicides or other things you may not
want in your compost....but if a rabbit would eat it, it's a sure bet that
something in the compost will too....

Basically I do think it is un-economic to buy in anything for composting,
when people are paying to throw away perfectly compostable stuff....

Coffee grounds are one good example, some places (Starbucks comes to mind)
will give away their's  to gardener's (saves disposal costs and gives good
PR), so if you can handle asking for wastes, you might find a restaurant or
other nearby point source that would be happy to separate a particular waste
material for you...

Coffee grounds are an easy choice because they are a pre-consumer item,
heated twice, low risk of odors, and so on.

Post-consumer items from restaurants are also compostable, of course, but a
higher standard of care and skill is required and they often would include
meats, fats and salts that could cause problems....

The salad chef's leavings is another N-rich source of pre-consumer vegetable
wastes, to be tapped into....

Hope this helps,

Frank Teuton

-----Original Message-----
From: GARDENGUY0@aol.com <GARDENGUY0@aol.com>
To: sqft@listbot.com <sqft@listbot.com>
Date: Saturday, September 11, 1999 8:58 AM
Subject: Re: Compost!


>Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html
>
>In a message dated 9/10/99 3:57:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time, CynMob@aol.com
>writes:
>
>> I dumped some general purpose fertilizer
>> 15-15-15
>ah?  Isn't this a little foolish? I mean yes it works but chemical
>fertilizers to ignite a supposed source of ORGANIC material?  Why not
rather
>find a bag of dried cow dung or fish meal or cottonseed meal (though some
say
>cottonseed is not truly organic) or rabbit food pellets (which contain
>alfalfa).  Chemical fertilizers kind of dump on the whole reason behind
>organic compost Don't you think?
>Bruce ...feeling slightly confused
>
>
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