General – Page 177 – Crazy About Compost

Finding the Best Recycled Plant Containers

Recycled plant containers are easy to find, but which ones do you want for your garden? By Cassandra Radcliff It's easy to find an old piece of junk that you can re-purpose into a plant container for your balcony garden. While doing research for my website, BalconyContainerGardening.com, I've seen a lot of recycled plant containers - anywhere from yogurt containers and Starbucks cups to toasters, shoes and even an old grill! So how can you choose a plant container for your garden? It's easy! Just look for the following four characteristics in a potential recycled plant container: 1. Size. A recycled plant container needs to be large enough to fit your full-grown plant in it. If you're just looking to grow seedlings in these recycled containers, that's fine. You can…

Why Compost Is Essential to Container Gardens (article)

Recently I was trying to learn more about how to turn my balcony into a healthy, useful garden...and that's when I found balconycontainergardening.com . Since I'm a complete newbie when it comes to gardening, I ended up spending hours reading articles on the site, which prompted me to write a letter of kudos to the owner, Cassandra Radcliff. I also asked her if she'd like to host some articles for my readers. :) I was extremely pleased when she wrote back with a yes, and now she will be periodically contributing guest articles. I often receive questions from readers pertaining to gardening, so now I hope to address some of those questions while at the same time learning from her in the process. Below is her first contribution to the…

Earthworms in the Compost: It’s a Good Thing.

Back in January I made a brief post about my compost tumbler being full of worms...and by worms I don't mean red wigglers, but earthworms. Who cares? Well, I've decided it's time to pay tribute to earthworms again, because they're often confused with red wigglers and their purposes get mixed up. Red wigglers are super resilient (e.g. temperature changes, crowding), live in organic material and have a serious appetite...they make the most sense in a full-on vermicomposting setup- anything from a super cheap/simple worm bin to the popular Worm Factory or Worm Inn options. Red wigglers aren't a guaranteed solution for your compost tumbler- it just depends on if they can adjust to the habitat. It's getting tumbled weekly and can get very hot- not necessarily hot enough to kill…