The Organic Composting Handbook: Techniques for a Healthy, Abundant Garden

by Dede Cummings

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the various methods of composting and how to adapt them to your home and garden. With full-color photographs and easy-to-follow instructions, this will be an essential addition to every gardener’s library.

Great compost is one of the most important secrets of successful organic gardening. Topics covered here

With growing concerns about the use of pesticides, herbicides, and GMOs in mainstream gardening practices, more and more families are turning to their backyards to grow their own food using methods they know are safe. The need for clear, straightforward instruction on organic gardening techniques has never been greater. With The Organic Composting Handbook, readers will get the information they need to prepare their gardens for healthy, abundant crops.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Adult

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 2014

About the author

Dede Cummings is a writer, award-winning book designer, publisher, and former commentator for Vermont Public Radio. At Middlebury College, she was the recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as an undergraduate fellow. In 1991, she received a fellowship to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. In 2013, she returned as a poetry contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has been published in Mademoiselle, Connotation Press, MomEgg Review, Green Mountains Review, among others, and anthologized in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. She was a Discover/The Nation poetry semi-finalist. In 2016, she was awarded a writer’s grant from the Vermont Studio Center. Her first poetry collection entitled To Look Out From was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published in 2017. Her second poetry collection, The Meeting Place, was published in 2020 by Salmon Poetry. Dede lives in Vermont, where she designs books and is the founder and publisher of www.greenwriterspress.com, a global press devoted to environmental activism, social justice, and sustainable publishing.

Dede lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, in a house built by her husband, Steve Carmichael. They have three children, Sam, Emma, and Joey. After Dede's most recent hospital stay and surgery for Crohn's disease in 2006, she began hiking the Long Trail (the length of Vermont) in one week sections, beginning to realize a long-term goal that had been put off due to illness.

Living With Crohn's & Colitis was her first published book. Her second book, "Cooking Well: IBS" came out October 25, 2011, and it is a description of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), and a helpful guide with lifestyle tips and over 100 recipes. The author was first diagnosed with IBS in her 20s, and it is her hope that by reading these books, people will become educated and informed about how lifestyle and diet are key to maintaining health in today's world. Book Number Three in this series is The Living With Crohn's & Colitis Cookbook.

Dede has published organic and holistic lifestyle series for Skyhorse, including The Medicinal Gardening Handbook, The Organic Gardening Handbook, and The Good Living Guide to Beekeeping.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Positive: Great pictures. Nice stories from composters.

Negatives: Author repeats things already written in previous chapters, as if she just wanted to make the book longer. Extremely poor editing.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Have to agree with the other reviewers - this book is kind of a mess. Needed an editor and a copy editor for sure. Also, the word "organic" seems to be in the title just for marketing, since compost is pretty darn organic to begin with and there's nothing special about calling it organic. I did pick up one or two pieces of information, but wasn't worth the trouble to be honest.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A most useful, approachable, and downright lovely book!

[Arminda Z · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve successfully composted before and definitely learned a fair amount I didn’t know or quite understand the science of. Also learned a couple things I’ve been doing wrong! Like someone said below, it was pretty repetitious and had some silly errors. That made some parts hard to read…but I don’t regret the time I spent finishing this library find and I enjoyed many of the anecdotes and side stories about sustainable efforts (including LA’s Ron Finley, an icon!).

[Remy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book should have been titled "Stories and musings from people who compost". There was very little useable information and lots of stuff was repeated. It was totally useless (for me and what I was looking for), but it did have nice photos. I would have really like more about the science behind composting instead of feeling like a neighbor was just sharing some rambling thoughts. :-P Another gripe: Chapter 10 (titled How the Science Works) didn't really discuss any science in any depth whatsoever (to my way of looking at it - maybe we define science differently) and then it went into discussing vermicomposting and worm bins. A waste of time.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot of good info in here about composting. There are also nice anecdotal side bars from other composters and composting organizations. I loved the section that talked about all the different composting efforts across the countey. There are also plans for different composting systems, which is nice. I do agree with the other reviewers that it is very repetative. I don't know if the editors envisioned people using it more as a reference book and only reading the chapters they needed or what. That said, I enjoyed reading the book straight through.

[Sam Mueller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a lot of wonderful information, especially for a beginner and someone interested in how it all works. It also had a lot of great personal anecdotes and stories about people within the community that are doing great things. However, it was very repetitive and had terrible editing. There were many spelling and grammar mistakes as well as many repeated words. I think it would be much better off (and maybe there is a newer edition) with another deep read-through and compression of content.

[Lindsay Dasin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little pretentious - immediately criticized the use of the black plastic composter I have in my yard. Lots of recommendations that only work if you have a whole farm of land to work with. There was a section on urban composting in NYC that also didn’t apply to suburbia. Ultimately, I still learned from it and it gave me more confidence in my “just see what happens” approach to composting so it still gets 3 stars. I borrowed it from my local library but I will not be buying a copy to keep for reference.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the authors personality and the excitement you can feel from her about composting. I’ve been composting for 3 years and I wanted to understand more about the process of it, and the science behind it, but this book is just a journal of the authors experiences. I felt the focus of the book was to get you to compost, but not the science behind it.

The pictures were beautiful, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. I lowered my rating to 2 stars because the book was extremely repetitive.

[Plum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bits are repeated which made me wonder if this was a blog that was made into a book. On the plus side it is filled with enthusiasm and lovely pictures. The advice about compost systems themselves is contradicted within the book, but that is so typical of composting advice generally, and absolutely to be expected.

[Timothy Riley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bit repetitive. Learned a little, don't compost meat scraps, make sure it's mixed nitrogen, carbon,etc. Turn frequently, make compost tea. I won't put anymore ashes in mine now. I would like to start a program at my school.

[Genessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fine if you’ve never heard of composting and you have the space to do on-ground bins. Useless if you are having any trouble with your compost or need to do it in a smaller space or enclosed bin, or if you are acquainted with composting and want to dig in (pun intended) deeper.

[An Te · Rating 4 out of 5]

Splendid information on all things composting. All the basics are in here for one as a gardener to reap the huge benefits of composting. Examples are given also to aid the novice. Thoroughly informative.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did find some new things in this book, but there was a lot or repetition. The few ideas I got were helpful, especially dealing with winter composting and not being as "perfect" as the Rodale system of organic gardening.
There were more photos than there were printed pages, I believe.

[Alyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview for understanding composting. I am new to incorporating composting at the house and in my gardening.

[Grace Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information, but not as engaging as it could have been.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really a lot of the information. Even less good information. 160 pages that could be condensed down to 10 pages.

[Kimberly Mccune · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid resource for the beginner composter but it tends to be repetitious and many of the very large photographs are out of focus.

[Iris · Rating 1 out of 5]

A lot of information is listed multiple times. A good edit is definitely needed.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seems like a combination journal / notebook / scrapbook covering all of the things the author has learned about composting over the years. There are some egregious typos in the book including, in one or two cases, entire sentences repeated, and a lot of the pictures are pixelated almost beyond recognition. The book was probably produced on a low budget and it shows.

To her credit, the author comes off as approachable and honest. She never claims to be an expert in all things compost and I do like her carefree and relaxed approach to composting, in contrast to the strict “do it this way or you will fail” guidance I’ve seen elsewhere. She borrows tidbits from a variety of mostly New England-based resources, so there are some interesting nuggets here and there for the reader patient enough to make it through the whole book. Still, I’m not sure there is really anything here that a couple of simple Google searches wouldn’t tell you.

[Anastasia Tuckness · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I should have a whole shelf for compost books ...

This one was fun to read, with lots of anecdotal snippets and stories and photographs along the way. It was kind of like a scrapbook of composting.

If you want a basic guide, I would probably start elsewhere. (Check out my gardening shelf for my favorites!)