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Tue, Mar 29, 11 at 18:40
| My main compost pile is pretty much finished for the season and everything has broken down nicely... everything except for pine needles. It is impossible to gather the leaves on my lawn without having lots of pine needles in the mix. Would there be any harm in using the finished compost with the pine needles in it, or should I filter the compost and either put the needles in the unfinished pile, mulch with them, or simply discard? They just seem to take an awful long time to break down. My instinct is to filter and much with them, but that's a lot of work. Thoughts?
Don |
Follow-Up Postings:
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- Posted by jonhughes So.Oregon (jonehughes@hotmail.com) on Tue, Mar 29, 11 at 19:24
| IMO ;-) I don't think there is any problem, use your compost to top off your beds, and anything that isn't completely finished will be fine sitting there and slowly molting into your medium. For the future however, when you are going to rake up your leaves, off of your lawn, run them over with the mower first (a couple of times even), and it will chew up the pine needles too, and it will add a blessing to your lawn as well. |
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| AS Always Jonhughes of the paradise gardens is right. I worked though school with a Nursery man. We were mulching a flower bed, mostly for looks. As I unloaded the pine straw from the truck, he turned the old pine straw over in the bed & hit it with the pitchfork. I ask him why, he answered that the straw had a wax on it, that is why it was slow to rot(compost). He was breaking up the wax that was acting like a floor sealant on the flower bed. If you shred or mow your pine straw before putting it in the compost pile it will break down a little quicker. Wooooo.. I think I will take a nap, now. |
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| Very often the finished compost I plunked onto my planting beds soil had needles from Red, White, and Austrian pine as well as needles from Black Spruce undigested at that time and there was no problem seen from that. Often the mulches of shredded leaves included pine needles and they did not pose any problems either. |
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