With Halloween come and gone, we shouldn’t forget that we have now an opportunity to show some more green savvy. How? Well, the most important thing is the Jack-O-Lantern. Before going green , I shamefully admit that at our household we just tossed poor old Jack into the trash. But that was before we knew better, right?
To start off, hopefully you would have used the pumpkin “pulp” to make a pumpkin pie, curry, fry, soup or whatever you fancy. And now that Jack has done his job adding a festive spooky atmosphere in our homes, he can still do more good in our garden.
According to our friends at Earth 911, there are more than enough reasons:
” 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.
….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.”
If you’re somewhat intimidated by composting and have never tried it before, the 911 people have you covered, with the best resources on composting on the net. Click here and start composting today!