Compost Your Pumpkin This Year
by Trey Granger on October 26th, 2007
Every year, one billion pounds of pumpkins are produced in the United States alone, including at least 100 million pounds in every state. Unlike many other aspects of your Halloween experience, pumpkins don’t come in difficult to recycle packaging, which should make proper disposal a no-brainer.
Pumpkins are a unique holiday decoration in that they are entirely natural, yet a majority of the nature gets thrown out once you’ve carved them. So, how can you make sure that the entire pumpkin is being used and not put into a landfill? The simple solution is to compost it.
Earth 911 has the most extensive composting resource on the internet, which will give you more information on what composting means and its benefits. To provide a quick definition, compost is the decomposition of organic materials to produce nutrient-rich soil enhancer.
Pumpkin seeds themselves are a strong source of nutrients, including zinc, iron and phosphorus. These are all great additions to a compost pile, assuming you don’t want to absorb these nutrients yourself in a pumpkin soup or pumpkin pie. So now that you know why to compost, let’s discuss how you do it.
Compost piles rely on a mix of nitrogen-rich greens (which will include pumpkin components) and browns (leaves, paper and other carbon-rich materials). So, Halloween is the perfect time to compost because you’ll have a bunch of leaves falling before winter that need to be raked anyway.
What you’ll be left with after the bacteria take over is a nutrient-rich fertilizer substitute for your garden. You’ll also get two stages of pumpkin compost, first when you gut it to create a jack-o-lantern and again when you smash up the shell in November.
The last benefit to composting pumpkins is that the product you’re creating is ideal for growing your own pumpkins. Lots of communities have pumpkin growing contests in October, so you might as well have an advantage based on what you’re growing with.
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