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The Organic Composting Handbook: Techniques for a Healthy, Abundant Garden Paperback – February 10, 2015
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Great compost is one of the most important secrets of successful organic gardening. Topics covered here include:
- What you can and can’t throw on your compost pile
- How to balance nitrogen and carbon in your pile for quick decomposition and rich compost
- Buying or building the best tools and containers
- Vermicomposting
- How to compost indoors
- Troubleshooting smelly compost, dry compost, and other problems
- How and when to apply the compost to your garden beds
With growing concerns about the use of pesticides, herbicides, and GMOs in mainstream gardening practices, more and more families are turning to their backyards to grow their own food using methods they know are safe. The need for clear, straightforward instruction on organic gardening techniques has never been greater. With The Organic Composting Handbook, readers will get the information they need to prepare their gardens for healthy, abundant crops.
- Print length192 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSkyhorse
- Publication dateFebruary 10, 2015
- Dimensions7 x 0.6 x 10 inches
- ISBN-101629141720
- ISBN-13978-1629141725
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Product details
- Publisher : Skyhorse (February 10, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 192 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1629141720
- ISBN-13 : 978-1629141725
- Item Weight : 1.54 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 0.6 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,529,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,213 in Gardening Encyclopedias
- #1,358 in Organic & Sustainable Gardening & Horticulture
- #1,595 in Vegetable Gardening
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Dede Cummings is a poet/writer, award-winning book designer, publisher, and commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate fellow. In 1991, she received a fellowship to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she returned as a poetry contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference to work on her poetry collection that began in 1978. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, The Lake, InQuire, Vending Machine Press, Birchsong, Connotation Press, Mom Egg Review, Figroot Press, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist. In 2016, she was awarded a writer’s grant and a partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her first poetry collection entitled To Look Out From was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published in the spring of 2017. Her second poetry collection, The Meeting Place, was published in the spring of 2020 by Salmon Poetry.
Her nonfiction titles are about holistic and alternative healthy lifestyles: organic gardening, beekeeping, herbal gardening, and home remedies. Dede's first book (co-written by naturopath Dr. Jessica Black), "Living With Crohn's & Colitis" is a bestseller in the field of medical memoir and coping with an incurable autoimmune disease. She is an advocate for people with Crohn's and colitis and has run three half-marathons to raise money for the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America. Dede lives in Vermont on a dirt road, in a solar-powered house her husband Steve Carmichael built, where she designs books and runs Green Writers Press. Her hobbies include hiking, yoga, running, reading, gardening, traveling, and backcountry skiing. Her publishing company, Green Writers Press, is distributed by IPG in Chicago (www.greenwriterspress.com), and her personal website is https://dedecummingsdesigns.com
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2016I like this book and ordered it for a gardening "newbie". Having great soil is so basic to having a productive garden. This book has good information and plenty of colorful pictures. It arrived in the condition described by the seller.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2019I purchased this book from Half Priced Books, normally a good source for cheap books, but in this case I feel I wasted my money. The Organic Composting Handbook has serious issues that should have been dealt with before publication. There is a lot of repetition that needs to be edited out. There are also numerous mistakes, such as on page 16. A small section called A Tangible Way To Go Green is followed by another section called Reduce Your Carbon Footprint. Both sections include the exact same information, word for word. On page 26 there is a list of no-no's, items not to add to a compost pile, and this list includes "X This No-No List" on the list.
There are factual errors in the book, too, like calling centipedes decomposers. Centipedes are predators that feed on decomposers in a compost heap. The book also says on page 89 that mitochondria break down compost. Mitochondria are structures inside eukaryotic cells and don't exist independently of those cells. They are not a decomposer.
There is useful information here, and the pictures are good, too, so the book deserves some credit. That said, I feel it needed considerable work by the author and an editor before it went to press.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2017While there are some lovely pictures in the book, it offers very little in helpful content. It is a collage of short stories and thoughts, many of which are incomplete and full of typos. Several sentences have been cut and pasted causing random repeating words with no clear meaning. I don't think it is possible that this book was proofread.
I am new to composting and therefore pretty sure it would not have taken a lot of content to impress me but this book sadly manages to disappoint anyway.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2016This book is full of potential. Unfortunately, it is very poorly edited (if edited at all). There are typos on almost every page. The occasional misspelled word wouldn't bother me, but the errors are so numerous that it starts to become obnoxious. There are a few errors that look like design/layout mistakes. For example, in the beginning chapters of the book there is a page which contains two sections. Though they have separate headings, the body text is identical. Mistakes like that really should be caught before going to print. It leaves me wondering if I'm getting all the information the author intended. Was some of the text left out due to design/layout errors?
The book is rich in photographs, but unfortunately an overwhelming number of these photographs are actually pixelated and blurry. As someone who enjoys visuals as much as good writing, this is disappointing. Again, I'm not sure how that got past the publishers.
The other thing I find odd about this book is the lack of the word organic in the actual text. Because it shows up in the title of the book, I assumed that organic composting is different from regular composting. Nowhere in the first four chapters does the author attempt to discuss why her book focuses on organic composting and what the differences are.
The author obviously understands the composting process, but her knowledge is almost lost in rambling chapters rampant with typos. This book could be so much better with a good round of editing and updated pictures. Ultimately, I returned my copy.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2015I found this book to be very basic and repetitive. It also jumps around from one person to the next. It really should have multiple authors listed. And while there are many lovely pictures, many of them are just pictures of the authors yard and such. They don't have relevance to what is being discussed. I am returning this book for something with more depth on the subject.