Kitchen Garden Forum

If you're anywhere near the coast (or visiting nearby) seaweed is excellent stuff for the compost heap

whole coffee beans to mulch! That's a bit excessive and expensive! Says something to me about these show gardens.

I've just read a useful article in a rival magazine (won't name it!) where they suggest bracken as a good compost enricher. They also suggest sawdust from local wood mills, but it takes a long time to break down (probably better used as a direct mulch). A liquid fertiliser can be made from old teabags, soaked in a bucket for a month and strained off. I'm going to give that one a go, as I get through an awful lot of tea (herb tea as well as chimps tea-party stuff).

Hello Molly
I'm a bit doubtful about using and handling bracken as a mulch or for composting. Every so often there are scares about its connection with certain cancers. Have a look at:

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/defau ... order=2797

The risk seems quite low but if farmers whose cattle are fed bracken are advised not to drink their own milk then there is obviously some problem there.
As far as wood shavings and sawdust goes the problem is that it takes such a long time to decompose. I once tried using wood shavings as a bedding for my chickens instead of straw and found that the shavings were still about in the compost after a year. Straw disappears quite quickly.
Good luck with the tea bags, I've heard that these contain some K.
John

Sawdust is all right when mixed with other materials, animal waste or other equivalent nitrogenous material and sufficient water.We had it in rabbit manure and it rotted. Wood chips have to be in very small quantities so it doesn't matter that they rot slowly.

I get most of mine from the local Gardeners (the ones your pay to do your garden if you are posh). In the summer I get at lease a dozen bags of grass and trimmings a week. Our allotments now get loads of bags dumped in our carpark as gardeners have to pay to dump it at the tip. Helps us helps them.

I know of an organic farm which uses coffee grounds in their compost. Their major concern was that coffee growing involves quite large amounts of pesticides. Fortunately (?) analysis showed that most of the pesticide residues are removed from the grounds in the process of making coffee.

Caffeine apparently attacks the nervous system of slugs. It might harm earthworms too though.

I believe Starbucks bag up their coffe grounds for gardeners to collect. Reading the posts on another compost forum based in the usa , it seems that coffee ground are the main green ingredient for compost making and there has been no mention of damage to worms, in fact the opposite.
Pete

Ha! Very pleased with myself: today I passed some men doing some work on trees alongside the road and they had a shredder! Screeched to a halt and asked them if I could beg some chippings for my allotment paths - and they ended up filling up my spare garden bags for me! So: always carry empty garden sacks in the car!

Croydon Council are giving away 3 bags of their own compost, this week. You just turn up and fill up your own bags...I am now in dispute with them over the defination of bag as I turned up with shougun & trailer and commenced to fill up my 3 x one ton bags, they were none to impressed but I got about 1/2 ton....he he.

nog wrote:Croydon Council are giving away 3 bags of their own compost, this week. You just turn up and fill up your own bags...I am now in dispute with them over the defination of bag as I turned up with shougun & trailer and commenced to fill up my 3 x one ton bags, they were none to impressed but I got about 1/2 ton....he he.

Defintely Nogbad the Bad.

If there is a loophole - I am there. NOG King of the Plot.