5 Things To Avoid Composting From Your Garden and Flowerbeds : One of the best ways to improve garden soil is to compost, but there are several things to avoid in your garden and flowerbeds. The fact that plants deplete raised bed and garden soil is well known. Growing plants use soil nutrients and organic materials. You must refill these supplies or your plants will suffer. Nutrient deficiency worsens annually.
5 Things To Avoid Composting From Your Garden and Flowerbeds
Compost is useful in the situation. When organic matter decomposes, the result is a substance known as compost. It supplies the plants and flowers with the nutrients and resources that they require in order for them to flourish.
1. Tomato Plants
Tomato plants should not be added to compost piles, however the majority of vegetable plants in your garden can. Tomato plants are a popular crop for home gardeners. They belong to the nightshade family. Regretfully, tomatoes are also among the most susceptible to illnesses and other problems.
2. Pepper Plants – Things To Avoid Composting From Your Garden
In your home compost pile, pepper plants should not be included, much like tomato plants. They belong to the nightshade family and are known to harbour and spread illnesses. Tomato and pepper plants are prone to pest problems in addition to illnesses.
Pests such as earwigs, grubs, fruit flies, ants, and others can settle in your compost pile by attaching themselves to abandoned plants. The next year, you will be adding these pests and illnesses back into the soil when you add compost to your newly created garden and flowerbeds.
3. Diseased Fruit or Foliage – Things To Avoid Composting From Your Garden
Any fruit, flower, or vegetable grown on your property is covered by this. Any unhealthy plant or fruit portion should not be added to compost piles. All you are doing is taking a chance that your entire compost pile may become contaminated by whatever sickness or problem is ailing the plants that you now have.
Regretfully, you probably won’t even recognise until it’s too late next year that there is a problem with the completed compost. You’ve just given those diseases a head start when you prepare your garden soil for the upcoming growing season by adding compost. It might be difficult enough to manage pests and diseases in a garden at times; don’t make it more difficult by utilising tainted fruit or foliage!
ALSO SE:Top 10 Easy Vegetables to Grow in Your Garden
4. Flower Heads – Things To Avoid Composting From Your Flowerbeds
Spend a little additional time cutting the flower heads off of the stems before putting any of your pulled flowers or flower trimmings to your compost pile. The seeds are kept in the flower head. You lessen the possibility that those seeds will be “planted” in the compost pile by chopping off the seed head. The seeds have the capacity to germinate and continue developing in the compost even though the flowers are no longer attached and growing on the plant while it is in the soil.
Just consider this: seedlings are ideally suited to sprout in your compost pile. It has an abundance of organic materials, mild moisture, and essential nutrients. It’s ready to produce new seeds! Furthermore, the heat in domestic compost piles is simply insufficient to destroy the seeds. The compost may contain seeds that are not only growing .
while it is in your bins, but they may also still be latent when you go to spread the compost over the soil in your garden or flowerbed the following year. You are practically “planting” those seeds as you combine the compost with your soil, and chances are they won’t land where you intended!
5. Fruit & Vegetable Seed Cores – Things To Avoid Composting From Your Garden
You should also remove the cores from fruit and vegetable seeds, just like you would with flower heads. In the long term, it will spare you from having to deal with volunteer plants growing up all over your flowerbeds and garden, even though it requires a bit more effort and time.
Just take off the seed core and discard it along with the remaining fruit or vegetable. You can add the remaining fruits and veggies to compost piles without any issues. Just make sure that before adding, you break them up into tiny pieces. (For instance, think about how long a whole watermelon rind will take to decompose as opposed to smaller pieces.)
Since many garden crops are hybrids, the plants you get from the compost pile may not be “true” plants. The fruit and vegetables volunteers grow may not be tasty or useful. These basic guidelines on what NOT to put to your compost pile from your garden and flowerbeds should help you create fantastic compost—that black gold that will energise your plants and flowers for the next growing season!
