Composting & Nutrition
» Organic Gardening
From a roundup of several books examining the role of composting in creating nutritious food.
The role of manure, so beloved by gardeners, is much discussed. Homes quotes the traveller and chronicler the Reverend Arthur Young who, after a six-week tour through the southern counties, praised the farmers of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk: “I have never met with any place around which the farmers had such a spirit of purchasing manures.” A Carthusian monk writing in the early 18th-century recommended dung of wheat-straw, being careful to mix the “excrementitious balls with the straw”. Pliny described a vineyard owner made wealthy through thoroughly “dunging” his vines over an eight-year period.