Creative Gardening

Posts Tagged ‘Humus’

Composting is absolutely one of the easiest and most environmentally friendly things you that can do, since food waste accounts for over 25% of the waste collected in the United States. Composting is as easy as collecting food remnants and yard trimmings and allowing them to decompose. This decomposed matter, called compost also known as humus, is also an excellent amendment to your soil. It adds important nutrients to your soil, helping you to grow healthier and more productive plants. You can even use compost as a potting medium.

Composting takes placeon it?s own, naturally, however if you residein an area with composting restrictions, or if you are looking to have your compost to mature faster, there are a few things you can do to expedite the process. Below are three tips to help you compost more effectively.

1. Use a compost bin. Today numeroud locations require the use of a compost bin rather than just allowing you pile up your food waste and yard trimmings. Food scraps attract rats and other animals; obviously, this is a problem. You can prevent animals from getting at your compost by using a compost bin. There are many different types available of compost bins for sale, but the most common is a black plastic bin with a lid on top for adding your organic matter, and a door at the bottom through which you can retrieve your compost.

2. No animal products in the compost. When we talk of food waste to be composted, that means the waste from fruits or vegetables; i.e. apple peels, onion peel, carrot peels and leaves, etc. You can also include eggshells (wash them off first to prevent the risk of salmonella) and coffee grounds and tea leaves (remove the bag first). It is critical to never include any meat or waste that has been cooked in oil or butter.

3. Build your Compost Pile. After putting in your ?green? scraps (food waste or yard trimmings) to your compost pile, you should add a ?brown? layer to the bin. The layer of ?brown? could be either strips of newspaper, leaves, straw, or even sawdust. Layering is an important way to build nutrient-rich compost. It also helps to keep the bugs and other animals down.

Using these three steps, you can easily create healthy, nutrient-rich compost at home. This will eliminate the need for costly soil amendments and will help to save the environment. So maintaining a compost bin helps lower your expenses by decreasing the amount of money that you are spending on gardening amendments; you know exactly what is going into your garden because the elements that make up the compost comes directly from your food; and you are helping the environment. It absolutely is like a great decision to make.

You can find compost bins for sale on the Internet. What are you waiting for? Get out there are start composting!

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Organic vegetable gardening is easy. But to help you, here are some tips you should know.

The most important thing to do is to decide what you want to grow. There are so many vegetables to choose from but keep in mind that certain vegetables cannot be grown because of the climate so take that into consideration as well.

So you want have a hard time taking care of it, choose those that are well adapted to the soil, temperature, sun and shade exposure.

If you live in an area where droughts are frequent, make sure you are planting drought resistant vegetables since it does not eat up that much water and can withstand dry weather.

You should determine how much space you have. This will make it easy for you to plot on a sheet of paper the layout of how you want your vegetables to grow.

You should mulch your vegetables with organic material. This can be made from food waste, dead leaves or grass and manure. This helps conserve water, adds humus and nutrients as well as discourage weeds from growing.

The best part is that you don?t have to dig deep to put these in because 85% of the vegetable?s roots are found in the top 6 inches of soil.

Aside from compost, you can also use natural fertilizers and organic material to help the vegetables grow. They also encourage native earthworms that are nature?s tillers and soil conditioners.

The biggest threat that could destroy your vegetables are pests. To get rid of them, you should use other insects, birds, frogs. If your crops though have been infected, spray infected stems and leaves with dilute soapy water and then clear water that is very effective.

If you decide to buy vegetables that are grown instead of using seedlings, most of these come in plastic containers. Be careful when you remove them so you avoid tearing the outside roots especially if these have grown solidly inside the container.

When planting vegetables, don?t stick with just one but plant many different kinds because this invites insects to take up resident in your yard.

Believe it or not, only 2 percent of the insects in the world are harmful. This means the rest are beneficial. Some examples of these include ladybugs, fireflies, green lacewings, praying mantis, spiders and wasps since they eat insects that try to eat your vegetables. Another thing they do is pollinate the plants and decompose organic matter.

Don?t forget to remove weeds that come out in your garden. You can pull these out by hand or spot spray it with a full strength of household vinegar. Best of all, it is safe for the environment.

Practice crop rotation. This will make sure that the soil is always fertile. When planting the new vegetable, avoid regular deep cultivation as this will damage the roots, dry out the soil, disturb healthy soil organisms and bring weeds to the surface that will soon germinate.

If you follow these tips, you will surely be able to have a successful organic vegetable garden. You can plant and harvest them all year round so you don?t have to buy these goods anymore from the supermarket. That is assuming of course you have a huge parcel of land to work with.

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Soil primarily had its beginning from rock together with animal and vegetable decay, if you can imagine long stretches or periods of time when great rock masses were crumbling and breaking up. Heat, water action, and friction were largely responsible for this. By friction here is meant the rubbing and grinding of rock mass against rock mass. Think of the huge rocks, a perfect chaos of them, bumping, scraping, settling against one another. What would be the result? Well, I am sure you all could work that out. This is what happened: bits of rock were worn off, a great deal of heat was produced, pieces of rock were pressed together to form new rock masses, some portions becoming dissolved in water. Why, I myself, almost feel the stress and strain of it all. Can you?

Then, too, there were great changes in temperature. First everything was heated to a high temperature, then gradually became cool. Just think of the cracking, the crumbling, the upheavals, that such changes must have caused! You know some of the effects in winter of sudden freezes and thaws. But the little examples of bursting water pipes and broken pitchers are as nothing to what was happening in the world during those days. The water and the gases in the atmosphere helped along this crumbling work.

From all this action of rubbing, which action we call mechanical, it is easy enough to understand how sand was formed. This represents one of the great divisions of soil sandy soil. The sea shores are great masses of pure sand. If soil were nothing but broken rock masses then indeed it would be very poor and unproductive. But the early forms of animal and vegetable life decaying became a part of the rock mass and a better soil resulted. So the soils we speak of as sandy soils have mixed with the sand other matter, sometimes clay, sometimes vegetable matter or humus, and often animal waste.

Clay brings us right to another class of soils clayey soils. It happens that certain portions of rock masses became dissolved when water trickled over them and heat was plenty and abundant. This dissolution took place largely because there is in the air a certain gas called carbon dioxide or carbonic acid gas. This gas attacks and changes certain substances in rocks. Sometimes you see great rocks with portions sticking up looking as if they had been eaten away. Carbonic acid did this. It changed this eaten part into something else which we call clay. A change like this is not mechanical but chemical. The difference in the two kinds of change is just this: in the one case of sand, where a mechanical change went on, you still have just what you started with, save that the size of the mass is smaller. You started with a big rock, and ended with little particles of sand. But you had no different kind of rock in the end. Mechanical action might be illustrated with a piece of lump sugar. Let the sugar represent a big mass of rock. Break up the sugar, and even the smallest bit is sugar. It is just so with the rock mass; but in the case of a chemical change you start with one thing and end with another. You started with a big mass of rock which had in it a portion that became changed by the acid acting on it. It ended in being an entirely different thing which we call clay. So in the case of chemical change a certain something is started with and in the end we have an entirely different thing. The clay soils are often called mud soils because of the amount of water used in their formation.

The third sort of soil which we farm people have to deal with is lime soil. Remember we are thinking of soils from the farm point of view. This soil of course ordinarily was formed from limestone. Just as soon as one thing is mentioned about which we know nothing, another comes up of which we are just as ignorant. And so a whole chain of questions follows. Now you are probably saying within yourselves, how was limestone first formed?

At one time ages ago the lower animal and plant forms picked from the water particles of lime. With the lime they formed skeletons or houses about themselves as protection from larger animals. Coral is representative of this class of skeleton-forming animal.

As the animal died the skeleton remained. Great masses of this living matter pressed all together, after ages, formed limestone. Some limestones are still in such shape that the shelly formation is still visible. Marble, another limestone, is somewhat crystalline in character. Another well-known limestone is chalk. Perhaps you’d like to know a way of always being able to tell limestone. Drop a little of this acid on some lime. See how it bubbles and fizzles. Then drop some on this chalk and on the marble, too. The same bubbling takes place. So lime must be in these three structures. One does not have to buy a special acid for this work, for even the household acids like vinegar will cause the same result.

Then these are the three types of soil with which the farmer has to deal, and which we wish to understand. For one may learn to know his garden soil by studying it, just as one learns a lesson by study. Read more other articles about miniature dogs and dog pounds.

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