"Compost" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's "Popular Antiquities." It appears that "on Christmas eve the farmers and their men in Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... that there were some mounds around which were scattered butterflies' and grasshoppers' legs and wings, parts of frogs and toads, and the little pellets usually ejected by owls in the process of digestion. I also found that these mounds were invariably covered by an animal compost gathered from the surrounding prairie. I resolved to put my theory to the test by digging into one of these holes. Here the Indian boy was a great help, as he thoroughly knew his verb "to dig." I followed the hole down through hardpan ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... cock, the ploughman's horn, Calls forth the lily-wristed morn, Then to thy cornfields thou dost go, Which, though well-soil'd, yet thou dost know That the best compost for the lands Is the wise master's feet ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... not your trespass, but my madness speaks: It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, Whilst rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven; Repent what's past; avoid what is to come; And do not spread the compost on the weeds, To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue; For in the fatness of these pursy times Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, Yea, curb and woo for ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... observed to occur every time my orders are such as he has never been given before. After a time he will, I think, become imbued with my unorthodoxy in these matters; and meanwhile he has the true gardening spirit and loves his work, and love, after all, is the chief thing. I know of no compost so good. In the poorest soil, love alone, by ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... to-night, with noble knowledge crammed, I 'mid this human compost take my place, I, once a poet, now so dead and damned, The woeful tears half freezing on my face: "O God!" I cry, "let me but take his shape, Moko's, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... you with his rural wisdom. For his whole existence is in the soil. He worships things under the earth. Dust he is, and to dust he shall return; (the sooner the better!) He prattles of potatoes, talks of turnips, harangues about horse-radish, knows no composition except compost. Speak to him of manners, and he will answer of manures. Like the Egyptians, he worships a bull; and has all the fondness of Pythagoras for beans. His only literature is Liebig's Animal Chemistry; his lighter reading, the Cultivator ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... interested in learning about the role of compost in soil fertility, better soil management methods and growing healthier, more nutritious food. Much like a serious home bread baker, audience one seeks exacting composting recipes that might result in higher quality. Audience two primarily wants to know the easiest and most convenient way ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... de Borch and M. de Bornholz give the chief accounts of the efforts that have been made towards the cultivation of these fungi. They state that a compost is prepared of pure mould and vegetable soil mixed with dry leaves and sawdust, in which, when properly moistened, mature truffles are placed in winter, either whole or in fragments, and that after the lapse of some time small truffles are found in the compost.[I] ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... Roger Bacon's Treatise concerning the Cure of Old Age, and Preservation of Youth: There being nothing so proper for Sallet Herbs and other Edule Plants, as the Genial and Natural Mould, impregnate, and enrich'd with well-digested Compost (when requisite) without any Mixture of Garbage, odious Carrion, and other filthy Ordure, not half consum'd and ventilated and indeed reduc'd to the next Disposition of Earth it self, as it should be; and that in Sweet, ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... to a very large extent. It is bad economy to burn the leaves, especially if one has herbaceous borders, roses, and other plants that need a mulch. When the leaves are taken off the borders in the spring, they should be piled with the manure or other refuse and there allowed to pass into compost (pages 110, 111). ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... be left from the steep stirred in with the civet, &c., greatly assists in making the whole of an equal body; the skin being cut up into pieces of about four inches square are then to be spread over, plaster fashion, with the last-named compost; two pieces being put together, having the civet plaster inside them, are then to be placed between sheets of paper, weighed or pressed, and left to dry thus for a week; finally, each double skin, now called peau d'Espagne, is to be enveloped in ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... wife, and even by his youngest children, he, found himself beginning to improve. In the mornings and evenings he cultivated his garden and his rood of potato-ground. He also collected with a wheelbarrow, which he borrowed, from an acquaintance, compost from the neighboring road; scoured an old drain before his door; dug rich earth, and tossed, it into the pool of rotten water beside the house, and in fact adopted several other modes of collecting manure. By this means he had, each spring, a large ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... to talk big; it's a kind of a right, When the tongue has got loose and the waistband grown tight; But, as pretty Miss Prudence remarked to her beau, On its own heap of compost ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... simply young love with its soul at its lips. But his Huckley 'Mobiquity' would have sickened a soap-boiler. It chemically combined loathsome familiarity, leering suggestion, slimy piety and rancid 'social service' in one fuming compost that fairly lifted me ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... made it the admiration of the world. A dissolute king was ruled by a succession of mistresses, and all the courtiers vied in emulating the vice and extravagance of their master. Yet in this foul compost-heap art and literature nourished with a tropical luxuriance. Voltaire was at the height of his splendid career, the most brilliant wit and philosopher of his age. The lightnings of his mockery attacked with an incessant play the social, political, and religious ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Ursulines had told her of the great plague in Milan—how one morning the walls and doors of many houses in the city had been found smeared with some foul substance, in broad streaks of white and yellow, which was believed to be a poisonous compost carrying contagion to every creature who touched or went within the influence of its mephitic odour; how this thing had happened not once, but many times; until the Milanese believed that Satan himself was the prime mover in this horror, and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon |
