"ROSE TIPS" MINI-COMPOST

I would love a compost bin, but haven't had the chance to build one yet. For the last several years we've had to make due. Since our garden is pretty small we use this technique: We keep an old 5 gallon ice cream container with poked holes in the lid. Around this time of year we put old coffee grounds, egg shells, orange and banana peel in this container. When the container gets full we mix it in the wheelbarrow with a bag of potting soil and then combine it with the soil in the garden. Sometimes I even add a whole pot of coffee into that mixture. Combined with leaves (mentioned in ROSE TIPS- TURN THE SOIL), it really does help to enrich the soil before planting. After the plants have been put into the ground, I just feed the plants with a couple of large spoonfuls on top of the soil, two or three inches from the stem.

Strange But True:

I do not have any indoor plants, but we do have a gold fish in a bowl. If I did have indoor plants, when I change the fish's water, I would use the old fish water to occasionally water the plants and give them extra nutrients.