The Complete Compost Gardening Guide: Banner batches, grow heaps, comforter compost, and other amazing techniques for saving time and money, and producing ... most flavorful, nutritous vegetables ever. | 
| Authors: Barbara Pleasant, Deborah Martin
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $12.64
You Save: $7.31 (37%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 62013
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 10.8 x 8.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1580177026
Dewey Decimal Number: 631.875
EAN: 9781580177023
ASIN: 1580177026
Publication Date: February 13, 2008
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Product Description
Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin turn the compost bin upside down with their liberating system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors' bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less digging, weeding, mulching, and even less planting. And here's one of the best parts — no more backbreaking slogs from compost bin to garden. The authors even identify the plants that benefit most from compost and how the elements of a composted garden work together.
A natural Six-Way Compost Gardening System provides the ruling principles for successfully improving every garden with healthy compost. Readers will learn how to:
1. Choose labor-saving sites that keep gardens and compost piles as close to one another as possible.
2. Work with the compostable riches produced at home. Every yard and kitchen produces plenty of material — easily identified with at-a-glance charts — for a great start.
3. Help composting critters do their work by balancing ingredients, adding high-nitrogen meals when needed, and keeping the compost moist.
4. Reuse recycling bin items, such as large plastic buckets and cardboard boxes, as composting equipment.
5. Keep diversity in the mix. The magic is in the variety of the components and how they work together to create "gardener’s gold."
6. Customize composting to suit specific garden needs, always concentrating first on soil care.
Adhering to these guidelines, Pleasant and Martin bring readers on a thorough, informative tour of materials and innovative techniques, leading the way to an efficient and rewarding home gardening system. Their methods are sure to help gardeners turn average vegetable plots into rich incubators of healthy produce, bursting with fresh flavor, and flower beds into rich tapestries of bountiful blooms all season long.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Complete Compost Gardening Guide July 21, 2008
Great information and suggestions for maintaining a compost pile. Book reassures and encourages the compost maker who does not generate a hot steaming compost that they are still on the right path.
 Great practical ideas and a wonderful "compost philosophy" June 26, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
My favorite passage from this book points out that buying hundreds of dollars of composting gear runs directly counter to the philosophy underlying a compost / organic garden. Composting is about using what you have where you have it, and that idea resonates throughout this book. While the basic methods will be familiar to experienced gardeners, it's still cheering and invigorating to see the many ways in which not only compost but also simple, raw organic matter can be worked directly into the garden. This book brings compost out of a complicated and expensive bin in the far corner of the yard and puts it back where it belongs, right in the center of the garden.
Its methods are also highly effective and nicely fleshed out, with the authors not only decribing how to set up sheet, crater, bin, and worm composts, but also giving invaluable tips on the types of crops that thrive in each. I took their advice and dug layers of leaves, grass, pulled weeds and food scraps directly into the earth, and the reward has been an most amazing crop of potatoes and squash - two plants that they rightly singled out as being particularly fond of a compost crater. Now, instead of trying to keep up with high-labor speed batches or buying a pricey tumbler, I'm letting my compost do the work itself, snuggled into the bottoms of dug or raised beds or, in the case of my pine needles, mulched right around the roots of the azaleas. It's a deeply satisfying feeling to stop lugging garbage bags full of organic material to the curb and instead look around at a yard that gives itself everything it needs.
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