Subject: Composting? & New Book

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 95 09:46:20 PDT

My Wife received a new book yesterday, "Herb Gardening", one of the
American Garden Guides, ISBN 0-679-41432-0. It's great but one particular
item suprised her. In a section on composting it said that you should
not put CITRUS skins etc. in to compost. This is the first time we had
seen this. Anyone else have a comment about this.

BTW: The book features gardens and is edited by individuals from
Cornell, U. of Mich. and UC Berkley.

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Jerry Kemp ([email-masked]>
I've got the money so I've got the Thyme

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From: [email-masked] (Dave Clark)
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 1995 16:50:20

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (D.C. Henderson) writes:
>From: [email-masked] (D.C. Henderson)
>Subject: Re: Composting? & New Book
>Date: 7 Jan 1995 18:01:05 GMT

>[email-masked] wrote:

>: My Wife received a new book yesterday, "Herb Gardening", one of the
>: American Garden Guides, ISBN 0-679-41432-0. It's great but one particular
>: item suprised her. In a section on composting it said that you should
>: not put CITRUS skins etc. in to compost. This is the first time we had
>: seen this. Anyone else have a comment about this.

>I imagine that the citrus skins would make for a "very very acid" 
>compost, so much so that it might burn plants with the "citric acid" in the 
>skins.

>On the other hand I grew some of the best garlic in my life in a raised 
>bed filled with composted orange skins and grass clippings...go figure!

I would suspect it's because of the large ammounts of chemicals used to grow 
citrus contaminating the compost.  But this brings up a particular pet peeve 
of mine.  I hate it when I read something that tells me not to do something 
and doesn't say why.  Would it really have hurt the author to say "Don't put 
citrus skins in because..."  These newsgroups are filled with people searching 
for answers that should be answered at the source.

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Dave Clark - Data General Corp. Westboro, MA
[email-masked]

Opinions expressed are my own.  Any resemblance to other opinions
living or dead are purely coincidental.
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