Need material for your compost pile???

I thought I would throw this out for people looking for lots of compost material quickly. My kids go to a charter school that composts, grows SFG's, as well as worm composting. At lunch time when the kids are done they have a bucket for everything that goes in the compost pile out back. It adds up quickly!!!!! I was surprised the teachers weren't using the coffee grounds from the staff coffee maker so I am starting to collect those for here at home. If you have a nearby school I bet they would be more than willing to cut down on their trash and hand over their fruit/vege lunch remains.

We here in the Keene NH area take our Jack-o-Lanterns VERY seriously (do you hear the tooting horn? Click HERE and HERE).
We (mostly) love our annual Harvest Festival & it is a lot of fun. So, practically all the school in the region have pumpkin carving (as the school nurse I am horrified!) and I am getting all my buckets together and bringing them to school on carving day. Some of the seeds will go to various homes for roasting, but I get ALL THE GUTS for my compost pile. This makes for a happy CampRN!

Very nice Ideas.

There is one material that I refuse to collect and that is hair from the salon or barbers shop........ I cant stand the thought of their hair in my roots.

I own a salon and I will every once in a while bring hair from work home. I'm not wild about it IN the compost but I did put it around my strawberries to keep the critters out, to no avail.

CampRN, do they use knives, or the little saw blades, to carve? The saw blades are much safer, and actually give you far better control. I use them as a grown-up because it's faster, and I can make better designs! (Yes, I still carve jack-o-lanterns, even if my kid doesn't want to) Of course here, it's a novelty, that les americains decorate their house for Halloween and have une citrouille illuminee on the front porch.

By the way...just a caution -- if you have a canine in your life, make sure you bury the remains of your pumpkin well after Halloween. Our big lab ate a good portion of it last year, before I looked it up on the web and found that not only do dogs LOVE the taste of pumpkin, it's an excellent cure for constipation (high fiber). He was sick for a couple of hours, with uncontrollable drooling (poor guy)....I sat up with him half the night until the symptoms began to fade, and was out at 10 pm with a flashlight and a trashbag tracking down all the busted-up chunks of pumpkin that he'd dragged off the top of my compost heap. Lesson learned!

@LaFee wrote:CampRN, do they use knives, or the little saw blades, to carve? The saw blades are much safer, and actually give you far better control. I use them as a grown-up because it's faster, and I can make better designs! (Yes, I still carve jack-o-lanterns, even if my kid doesn't want to) Of course here, it's a novelty, that les americains decorate their house for Halloween and have une citrouille illuminee on the front porch.

By the way...just a caution -- if you have a canine in your life, make sure you bury the remains of your pumpkin well after Halloween. Our big lab ate a good portion of it last year, before I looked it up on the web and found that not only do dogs LOVE the taste of pumpkin, it's an excellent cure for constipation (high fiber). He was sick for a couple of hours, with uncontrollable drooling (poor guy)....I sat up with him half the night until the symptoms began to fade, and was out at 10 pm with a flashlight and a trashbag tracking down all the busted-up chunks of pumpkin that he'd dragged off the top of my compost heap. Lesson learned!

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I agree LaFee, I have encouraged the adults to use the knives to cut the tops of the pumpkins open but some of them still allow the students to do that. Sometimes the students will use the knives. We are talking middle school students, 12-14 year olds. We do use the carving kit tools, the plastic hand drills and the little saws. I think they are better tools for the project ( and safer). Last year I only sent one student for sutures.

When I am pumpkin carving at home, I use a really nice set of stainless vegetable carving tools that a friend of mine brought brought to me from Cambodia . Those are FABULOUS for nice intricate work.

OH and thanks for the tip about canines eating pumpkin, that I did not know!

@CarolynPhillips wrote:
There is one material that I refuse to collect and that is hair from the salon or barbers shop........ I cant stand the thought of their hair in my roots.

Can't find my gardening book which talks about why hair is good and what it contains exactly. I do remember that it contains valuable minerals that your plants will love, very similar to what is in bones or cows' hooves. I use it a lot. It doesn't stay like hair very long but turns to a kind of gelatin in the bottom of the pot......especially if I can't get bone or blood meal.

GK