Home Composting Made Easy - Softcover

C. Forrest McDowell; PhD; Tricia Clark-McDowell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0942064747 ISBN 13: 9780942064742

Publisher: Cortesia Press, 1998

Synopsis

Home Composting Made Easy is considered to be the best educational guide on home composting for the public. It is used throughout North America by hundreds of municipalities, counties, waste management districts, states, organizations, and businesses. Absolutely the easiest and funnest book to read about composting: Home Composting Made Easy is fully illustrated with step-by-step, no-nonsense instructions and state-of-the-art advice by gardening and compost experts. Content includes: What is Compost?, Benefits of Compost, Compost: Key to Nutrition, Setting Up Your System, Composting Systems, Siting Your Compost Area, Stockpiling Materials, Composting Basics, What to Compost, The Carbon/Nitrogen Ratio, How to Use Activators, Turning Your Pile, Composting: A Quick Start Guide, The Add-As-You-Go Pile, The Batch Pile, Grass Clippings, Food Scraps, Leaves & Weeds, Garden Debris, Worm Composting, Compost Tea, Stages of Composting, Using Finished Compost, Questions & Answers, Troubleshooting Chart, Resources

About this title

About the Author

Professional garden and wellness educators, Dr. C. Forrest McDowell and Tricia Clark-McDowell have over 25 years of experience in their own 2-acre garden at their 22-acre Cortesia Sanctuary in Eugene, Oregon. Their 32-page Home Composting Made Easy (Cortesia Press) is the world's most popular guide for the home gardener, with over 1 million copies in print. It is used by hundreds of governmental agencies, organizations and businesses throughout North America. Their newest Made Easy guide is the 68-page Grow Your Own Food Made Easy (Cortesia Press, 2009), already a bestseller in the food security movement in North America.

Review

Late last fall, I bought a composting bin from my county, determined to stop wasting all those perfectly good, brown leaves laying all over my backyard. Along with the bin, I received a colorful, short (32-page) book, called Home Composting Made Easy.Unfortunately, I didn't read the book right away, and the next thing you know, the winter had set in. For several months, as the temperature dropped into the teens or even single digits, I gave the compost bin -- or the book -- little thought...

Early the next spring, I looked inside my compost bin and, big surprise, not a lot of composting had gone on during those frigid December, January, and February months. It was right then that I realized, hey, I have no idea what the heck I'm doing here!

Luckily, I still had that colorful, little book on composting, and pretty soon I had the answers to all my questions: the pile needed water (duh!) and turning (double duh!) in order to aerate it. And really, that's all it took, regular turning and moistening, and now I've got a bin full of rich compost: black gold, as the book calls it. Boy, is my garden going to be happy when I spread it around! Anyway, the moral of this story is that composting is rewarding, environmentally beneficial, and not difficult at all - assuming, of course, that you've got Home Composting Made Easy; and that you actually read it! --L. Feld Lowkell (Arlington, VA)

If you want to walk in the shoes of our country s first president, try composting. None other than George Washington was an avid believer in the practice; he kept a diary of what scraps were added daily.

That historical nugget and a similar passion for saving the Earth, in this instance the soil, is shared by our School and Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education, or SCARCE.

Thanks to two centuries of composting refinements, the process no longer has to assault the nose. To help people get started, SCARCE recommends the McDowell's 32-page brochure, Home Composting Made Easy, as a comprehensive, easy-to-follow, even humorous guide. We have used it for many years! It covers the numerous variables: composting systems that range from a pile in the backyard to specialized bins; the amount of care one wants to invest; differing techniques that vary the lag time until compost is ready to add to your soil from three weeks to a year; placement of the compost pile or bin in the yard; and what can and can t be used, including species of plants that are not beneficial.

The authors offer a reminder: Composting challenges us to take a little more responsibility as a planetary citizen. --Kay McKeen, founder School and Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education, or SCARCE, Glen Ellyn, IL

Pros: Fun, very clear, lots of visual aids

Cons: Nothing

The Bottom Line: This little book is packed with information to get anyone acquainted with successful composting. At the same time, it makes the topic fun and easy.

Home Composting Made Easy covers everything, starting from the very beginning of how to compost. If you have never composted before and you are clueless, then this is a handy book.

The pages of Home Composting Made Easy are busy with graphics, clip art, diagrams, and so on. Although some of these graphics seem a little mismatched, I was not bothered by this. I felt that the pictures livened the topics, often helping me to find what I was looking for more quickly as I browsed through pages of information. Diagrams came in handy in terms of illustrating a point, such as finding a good place to situate your compost bin.

There is also a lot of use of bold and various size print. It seemed as if in writing this book, rules where thrown out the door. I found absolutely nothing wrong with this method! I enjoyed seeing large bold print exclaiming Don t Compost: or Do Co --Javelina, upstate New York

If you want to walk in the shoes of our country s first president, try composting. None other than George Washington was an avid believer in the practice; he kept a diary of what scraps were added daily.

That historical nugget and a similar passion for saving the Earth, in this instance the soil, is shared by our School and Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education, or SCARCE.

Thanks to two centuries of composting refinements, the process no longer has to assault the nose. To help people get started, SCARCE recommends the McDowell's 32-page brochure, Home Composting Made Easy, as a comprehensive, easy-to-follow, even humorous guide. We have used it for many years! It covers the numerous variables: composting systems that range from a pile in the backyard to specialized bins; the amount of care one wants to invest; differing techniques that vary the lag time until compost is ready to add to your soil from three weeks to a year; placement of the compost pile or bin in the yard; and what can and can t be used, including species of plants that are not beneficial.

The authors offer a reminder: Composting challenges us to take a little more responsibility as a planetary citizen. --Kay McKeen, founder School and Community Assistance for Recycling & Composting Education, or SCARCE, Glen Ellyn, IL

Pros: Fun, very clear, lots of visual aids

Cons: Nothing

The Bottom Line: This little book is packed with information to get anyone acquainted with successful composting. At the same time, it makes the topic fun and easy.

Home Composting Made Easy covers everything, starting from the very beginning of how to compost. If you have never composted before and you are clueless, then this is a handy book.

The pages of Home Composting Made Easy are busy with graphics, clip art, diagrams, and so on. Although some of these graphics seem a little mismatched, I was not bothered by this. I felt that the pictures livened the topics, often helping me to find what I was looking for more quickly as I browsed through pages of information. Diagrams came in handy in terms of illustrating a point, such as finding a good place to situate your compost bin.

There is also a lot of use of bold and various size print. It seemed as if in writing this book, rules where thrown out the door. I found absolutely nothing wrong with this method! I enjoyed seeing large bold print exclaiming Don t Compost: or Do Compost , and other loud titles shouting out things like Pros , Cons , Step 1 and whatnot. There are so many stages to setting up a compost bin, composting your waste, and then using that compost. Home Composting Made Easy simplified the information by breaking it down into bits and pieces of prioritized information.

I definitely like the size of Home Composting Made Easy. It s not quite a book but it s also not just a pamphlet that gets lost. It makes it easy to keep this book somewhere that is handy, somewhere that it is on hand when you have questions about your compost. I kept mine on a kitchen shelf where I could easily grab it if I had a question such as what I could or couldn t put in the compost bin.

In the back of the book, the Troubleshooting Guide and Resources sections are both very helpful. Although the list of problem symptoms is not long, it is relatively comprehensive considering the subject matter. With a page of resources, anyone interested in composting or learning more is able to research further materials. There are books, videos, periodicals and internet websites included in the list.

It is apparent that the authors are truly involved in environmental awareness. The authors, who have created other publications and resources, are the co-directors of the Cortesia Sanctuary & Center for Natural Gardening and Healing, located in Oregon. The book also provides you with their huge educational website to learn even more about home composting.

So no matter what kind of compost bin you have and no matter what your level of experience is in composting, Home Composting Made Easy is for you. This guide is very comprehensive. I would characterize it as an enjoyable and simple reference book for any level of experience. As you read through bulleted lists and browse through charts and pictures, the skills of composting will be easily absorbed. Hopefully, this book will result in diverting over 30% of your total home waste from landfills, simply by composting kitchen, yard, and garden waste . Not to mention, all that really great mulch!

Home Composting Made Easy has helped me to successfully compost a great deal of material, leaving me with some nutrient-rich soil that plants absolutely love. Ideas and concepts are presented clearly and concisely. With its lighthearted, fun, and often humorous approach, I never felt as though I was slogging through... well... compost! --Javelina, upstate New York

Edition details

• Publisher: Cortesia Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0942064747
• ISBN 13: 9780942064742
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 6
• Number of pages: 32