What did you compost today?

[JRinPA]

By the way, I've been composting for more than a couple decades and fondly remember the Soil, Compost, and Mulch forum on GardenWeb with its occasional Garden Haiku and "what did you compost today?" (the weirder the better) threads.

[karstopography]

A Wormy pineapple tomato. A couple of Guajillo peppers half eaten by a rabbit.

[Seven Bends]

A big bag of Wando pea pods. Empty ones, I mean, after eating all the peas. The pea vines will be hitting the compost pile later, once I find the enthusiasm to chop them up. Right now they're just sitting in a pile at the edge of my garden. I hope I don't find them still sitting there in November, but that could happen.

[pondgardener]

After our recent hail storm, the water lilies in the pond were cut to pieces. So, after removing the three buckets that contained the plants, I removed all the damaged pads, leaving the new starts that were below the water's surface. And I added these to the damaged water hyacinths that I trimmed.

[JRinPA]

A few days back, it was the row of spinach from Aug that started bolting in late May. That made a quite a stack of new mix at the comm garden, mixed with some older wood chips for brown.

Yesterday though - I planted potatoes at the house and used finished compost. Has a some sticks and fish bones so I tumble-sift it first, and keep the rough stuff to shred. Right in the first shovelful, catfish skull plate. Alas poor Yorick.

01.JPG

Recall the hard fight
Years beneath the surface done
No choice but to strike

A nice channel cat on light tackle takes some work. Probably caught on a redworm from the same pile, or maybe a night crawler from under it. Or some BSF larva if it was a late summer catch. One way or another the bait was from that pile. True cycle of life right there.

[JRinPA]

Pea vine, I got myself a few years ago cutting them up. 4-5-6 ft of vine will bind up my shredder fast, when green, so I got the bright idea to make a vine cutter from, literally, an old rusty plastic handled machete. I did sharpen the edge a bit, no rust there. Yep just tape that there and clamp that like so and cut them down to size before shredding. Still have 2" of scar on my left inside forearm to reinforce the notion that it was a bad idea. I still don't know how it shifted like it did, and I had plenty of peroxide swab time to ponder it.

[worth1]

Jimmy Hoffa.

[Seven Bends]

Jimmy Hoffa.

Not sure that's a great idea. Won't it take a long time for the cement shoes to break down?

[bower]

Old broccoli leaves. Dandelion clocks. Forgetmenots.

[karstopography]

Another wormy tomato, Pruden’s purple.

[JRinPA]

Picked the first two cabbage of the season at 4-5 lbs and pulled their bottoms to make some room. That went to compost. The rows (brassica) were still under ag19 and look worm free. Absolutely amazing difference in size and worms between mine and the same Bravo cabbage plants in another plot that were not covered or sprayed. Practically ready for compost now, but I sprayed them with BT and praised agribon. I also uncovered the broc/cauliflower row for the first time to find the three southernmost cauliflower dead in their holes - I'm guessing 6 weeks back on the May 17 frost. They were tiny, black, and rotted, yet strangely still intact since they were covered all this time. They felt weird...I sprayed both rows with BT and re-covered them for another week. When those rows are all composted, I guess fall peas will go there. Root fruit leaf legume is easy enough to remember.

[Peebee2]

Dried & shriveled arugula and lettuce that I got tired of collecting seeds from. I figured whatever is left will sprout next season when I use the compost.
Mango seeds & peel. Oh how the worms love them. When I pick up the seeds in a few days it's like worm spaghetti stuck to the bottoms. What a thrill to see!

[GoDawgs]

Squash peelings, ends of cucumbers (cut off prior to making relish), coffee grinds, egg shells, a few wilty celery stalks, chopped up kale stems.
Corn cobs went into the trash as they don't compost down very well.

[Seven Bends]

My parents taught me not to compost cabbage & broccoli (neither the plants nor the edible portion) but didn't know where they learned that or what the reason for it was. Does anyone know of any reason not to compost them, other than perhaps an objectionable odor if they don't compost well? Those plants are huge, and it seems wasteful not to compost them.

[karstopography]

My parents taught me not to compost cabbage & broccoli (neither the plants nor the edible portion) but didn't know where they learned that or what the reason for it was. Does anyone know of any reason not to compost them, other than perhaps an objectionable odor if they don't compost well? Those plants are huge, and it seems wasteful not to compost them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 817f3162b/

Looks like it might be related to the idea composting those will spread fungal and viral diseases. The article addresses that concern as perhaps or likely being overblown depending on one’s situation and perspective.

I’ve noticed a little here on TJ and even more online with garden help sites some gardeners are super vigilant about and very concerned with and some experts recommend taking every step and precaution possible to minimize the spread of diseases. I haven’t been plagued with many untreatable and catchy fatal plant diseases in my garden like perhaps others are so it is hard to appreciate some of the extra measures people take or recommend with constantly disinfecting this tool or that container, or avoiding such and such practice like what not to compost or reuse.

I guess until one’s garden is destroyed by a disease a lot of these measures seem to be overkill. We don’t all garden in the same places and there are apparently very bad and difficult to deal with diseases that are more prevalent in some areas. But, when I go online and look at garden interest sites, I see examples of gardens completely wiped out by some viral or fungal issues so no doubt this bad news fatal garden disease stuff is real.

I don’t disinfect anything related to the garden, put in anything that will compost including cabbage, mustard and nightshade family plants into the compost bin, reuse soil and containers without cleaning or washing out, and generally do about everything many of those sites say not to do, like necessarily following all the rules on crop rotation. I’d say every year my garden gets better overall than worse from previous seasons so I plan on doing things the way I do until it no longer works.

[Seven Bends]

@karstopography, thanks for the link and your thoughts on it. I discard rather than compost all of our tomato plants & prunings because of the rampant fungal diseases we have around here (early blight, septoria and anthracnose). Any pepper plants with bacterial leaf spot or other signs of disease are discarded as well. My compost piles are kind of haphazard and never get particularly warm, so I don't really want to count on the fungus spores being destroyed in the composting process, despite what the source in the article says. My discarding these materials maybe doesn't help much, though, as the garden is in the middle of many other plots at a community garden, and the spores are flying around everywhere from everyone's plants.

I almost never see any disease on our cabbage or broccoli plants, though -- just insect pests (cabbage worms, white flies, and harlequin bugs). So if that's the only issue, I think I'll start composting these plants and see how it goes.

[habitat-gardener]

Squash peelings, ends of cucumbers (cut off prior to making relish), coffee grinds, egg shells, a few wilty celery stalks, chopped up kale stems.
Corn cobs went into the trash as they don't compost down very well.

I always compost corn cobs! iirc I used to find worms in the center of corn cobs and corn stalks after the first sifting. Haven't had corn this year yet, though I am growing a few corn plants this summer, so I will have both corn cobs and corn stalks.

[habitat-gardener]

Some expired liquid vitamin B12. I prefer the methylcobalamin and these were both cyanocobalamin (and expired).
I always rinse out my yogurt containers into the compost bucket, assuming the compost critters will enjoy the bits of probiotic bacteria.
Hair, fingernail clippings. Cat fur: some from brushing the cat, but mostly from the floor, with dust.

[bower]

I think every crop I've ever grown, at some point I'm reading about the IPM or disease management, and read the same advice for every crop, not to put residues in the compost. So I try to do different crops in different piles if I can, but not too strict about it. My sloppy slow piles get left for a full year anyway before they get used, preferably for the alternate crop.
OTOH I sometimes get scary looking disease on supermarket produce, which I don't want to compost because I may introduce something nasty that I don't even have.
Do not compost is probably great advice if you have a serious disease that has to be curtailed.

[GoDawgs]

I compost any leave, stems etc from cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale and any other brassicas resulting from kitchen prep. Any plants pulled from the garden mainly go back to Mt. Brushmore. That's the "everything" pile at the edge of the woods; tree branches, old plants, weeds etc. By the time I'm pulling garden plants those plants are most likely harboring some kind of funk at the end of their run in life so they don't get composted. I don't have a chipper shredder so large stuff (corn stalks) would take forever to compost and there's no front end loader to turn a big pile. No time to sit and chop up corn stalks or cobs. Did that one year and quit after about an hour and many stalks to go!

The only sanitation I do other than washing out tomato buckets is on the tools I use in the garden. That's because it is recommended to reduce the spread of nematodes that are in my garden soil. When I'm finished with one bed, the hoe or shovel will get rinsed with water and sprayed with a 10% bleach solution before being used in another bed.

As a side note, it seems that there's recently been a few stories in the literature about finding that there is something produced by brassica roots that seems to deter nematodes. I have been rotating my brassicas through beds where the 'tode problem has increased and it seems that subsequent plantings haven't been bothered by 'todes as much, at least through one season.