I have a compost bin. Actually, I have four of them. Because I’m all about being eco-friendly, I use compost to enrich the soil. About two years ago, I read an article that stated: “Most home compost bins do not get hot enough to kill weed seeds.”
Well, that explained a LOT! For a number of years, I was inadvertently putting weed seeds back into my garden all the time. I now understood why I never seemed to get a handle on the weeds—and why they started showing up in places they’d never been before. I had been blaming the birds—but all this time, it was my ignorance about weed-seed-free composting!
These days, I only compost leaves, coffee grounds, and vegetable and fruit scraps. Except now I’ve discovered a new, painful truth. Watermelon rinds attract bees. Bees will attack if disturbed while they are enjoying the watermelon rinds.
I learn something new every day … most often the hard way. ❖
What’s your worst gardening mistake? Email us your 200-300-word summary to submissions@greenprints.com with “Broken Trowel Entry” in the subject line—if we publish your item, you win the Broken Trowel Award and get a free one-year subscription and our GreenPrints Companion CD!
This article was published originally in 2023, in GreenPrints Issue #135.
I was just thinking about this very thing today. My small, neglected vegetable bed is absolutely chock full of weeds and I realized that they had probably come from the “compost” I had used from our compost bin in the spring. And now, thanks to this article, I know now to rectify the problem 🙂