Local gardeners are experimenting with straw bales, taking advantage of the internal composting to help their garden grow. As a little boy growing up on a Minnesota farm, Joel Karsten wondered why the ...

You might think you know what to put on your compost heap and what to leave out, but there are several unusual compost ingredients that most of us probably don’t think about adding. It means you could ...

Compost piles work due to a careful balance between green and brown material. Knowing exactly what those materials are helps ...

Q: Thanks for your recent column about composters you can buy. I built my own last year out of untreated wood pallets; it’s partially open-air and it’s about a 4-foot cube in a fairly sunny location.

Wood ash can be a valuable addition to your garden soil, bringing with it essential nutrients like potassium and phosphorus. In fact, ashes from your wood-burning fireplace can improve your garden’s ...

It’s International Compost Awareness Week and a perfect opportunity to “Give Back to the Earth” in the form of rich compost that will nourish it and your garden. Here are some do's and don'ts to ...

For gardeners who heat their homes in winter using stoves or fireplaces, good-quality wood ashes can be a soil-amendment bonus. But if applied improperly, they can be a caustic topping for ...

Want a cheap solution that minimizes time spent weeding and watering your garden? Add a layer of mulch. You can even get it free if you haul your own from one of the many municipal piles. When tree ...

Gardeners often assume outdoor compost piles stop working in cold weather, but beneficial microbes can continue to break down compost all winter. The problem is that composting takes much longer in ...

Odor emissions from wastewater treatment facilities and composting operations and land application of biosolids are priority concerns for wastewater engineers, compost operators, and biosolids ...