"Compost" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bottom surface, as gladiolus seedlings greatly dislike waterlogged soil. An inch of pebbles, broken shells or sterilized potsherds should be placed in bottom and pot or box filled to within one-half inch of top with light compost made of two parts rich loamy soil and one part sand, well mixed together. Some very old fine manure may be used, but it should be confined to the bottom third of the receptacle and not come into contact with the seeds or resulting bulbs. The seeds previously rubbed ...
— The Gladiolus - A Practical Treatise on the Culture of the Gladiolus (2nd Edition) • Matthew Crawford
... effluvium which is almost inevitable in all family residences, The general principle of construction is somewhat like that of a water-closet, except that in place of water is used dried earth. The resulting compost is without disagreeable odor, and is the richest species of manure. The expense of its construction and use is no greater than that of the common water-closet; indeed, when the outlays for plumber's work, the almost inevitable troubles and disorders of water-pipes ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, That 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 leave to do ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... have my daily calls on every side, Churches remote and gleve and pasture wide, Great herds of breeding cattle, ghostly sheep— All to be watched and cared for, clipt and fed, Grain to be winnowed, compost to be spread;— Wanted all day in shippon and in stall, What time have I to serve ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... if we rejoiced in the rains of Bavaria, there was no cause for glee in those torrents of Glencoe, for they made our passage through the country more difficult and more dangerous than it was before. The snow on the ground was for hours a slushy compost, that the foot slipped on at every step, or that filled the brogue with a paste that nipped like brine. And when the melting snow ran to lower levels, the soil itself, relaxing the rigour of its frost, became as soft as butter and ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... others' larger grounds: For well thou know'st, 'tis not the extent Of land makes life, but sweet content. When now the cock, the ploughman's horn, Calls forth the lily-wristed morn, Then to thy corn-fields 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 and hands. There at the plough thou find'st thy team, With a hind whistling there to them; And cheer'st them up by singing how The kingdom's portion is the plough. This done, then to th' enamell'd meads, Thou go'st; and as thy foot there treads, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of planting the Sets; of Dressing, Pruning, and Governing the Plantation; of the Ordering and Cultivating the Vine-yard after the first four years, till it needs renewing; as also of the manner and time, how and when to manure the Vine-yard, with Compost, will be better understood from the Book it self, than can be here described; the Author pretending, that, those few observations of his, as the native production of his own Experience, being practised with care, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... it would form a basin to hold water and injure the tree. A ditch, as low as the bottom of the holes, should extend from tree to tree, and running out of the orchard, constructed in the usual method of drains, and, whatever be the subsoil, the trees will flourish. The usual compost to manure the trees in transplanting will be found elsewhere. In the bottom of these places for apple-trees should be thrown a plenty of cobblestones, with a few sods, and a little decaying wood and coarse manure. We know of nothing so good under an apple-tree as small stones; ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... was 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 ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... and if he detects traces of the white grub, cross-plow it again just as the ground is beginning to freeze. Early in the spring he can cover the surface with some fertilizer—there is nothing better than a rotted compost of muck and barn-yard manure—at the proportion of forty or fifty tons to the acre. Plow and cross-plow again, and in each instance let the first team be followed by a subsoil or lifting plow, which stirs and loosens the substratum ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... colossal liar a great diplomatist, and a petty prevaricator a base and ignoble fraud? Why is Napoleon a hero, and that wretched tramp an ever to be dreaded murderer? Why is Bismarck called great, though he crushed the French into a compost of blood and rags, ground them by taxation into paupers, jested at dying children, and lied most foully, and his minor imitators are dubbed criminals and thieves? Look here, now, young man! If you, by a quiet, firm, indomitable determination succeed ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Place the roots in it until the crowns are just covered, and about 2 inches apart, in rows 6 to 8 inches apart then place on top about 8 inches of any kind of light covering such as leaf mold or other light compost. This must be light or otherwise the heads which will grow from the crown will open out instead of keeping firmly closed and conically shaped. On the top of the light soil, manure (if it can be procured fresh, all the better) should be placed to a thickness of about 12 ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous
... loyal, and when he saw his mother's tears and his sister's shame, something rose within him that had it been given play might have made a man of him, but, being crushed, died and rotted, and in the compost it made all the evil of his nature flourished. The looks and gibes of his fellow-employees at the barber-shop forced him to leave his work there. Kit, bowed with shame and grief, dared not appear upon the streets, ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... my face never looked anxious till I thought of marrying, or pale till I took to scribbling), the possessors of which were experiencing a little the torment of Tantalus. The palisades, those graves of sand, turned into a rich compost by the ever-recurring burial, were directly under the windows, and the land-breeze came over them, chill and dank, in palpable currents, through the jalousies, into the heated room; and, had one thrust his head into the moonlight and looked beneath, he would have seen ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... called the organic elements of wheat (the combustible part) there are seven times more nitrogen in 100 pounds than in a like weight of straw. Hence, if the farmer converts straw into manure or compost, with the view ultimately of transforming it into wheat, it will take 7 pounds of straw to yield nitrogen enough to form one pound of wheat. Few are aware how much labor and money is annually lost by the feeding of plants on food not strictly adapted to the peculiar wants of nature in organizing ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... towards the apartment of the holy inquisitor; but in the act of setting foot at its entrance, the trap opened, and the world of the living heard no more of him. I examined some of the earth found in the pit below this trap; it was a compost of common earth, rottenness, ashes, and human hair, fetid to the smell, and horrible to the sight and to the thought ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress. And also it was a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of fecund wheatkidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits that they do in to it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... broken into very simple compounds, some of them, indeed, being dissipated into the air, but other portions are retained and then oxidized, and these latter become the real fertilizing materials. Through the agency of bacteria the compost heap thus becomes the great source of plant food to the farmer. Into this compost heap he throws garbage, straw, vegetable and animal substances in general, or any organic refuse which may be at hand. The various bacteria seize it all, and cause the decomposition which ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... restraint, is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control of the Chambers. The stage, that "mirror of the times," is often the first manifestation of the unquiet heaving and subsequent up-bubbling in the fluid compost of the mass that constitutes a nation. When freely developed, it is the pulse-beat of the people. And so, throughout the Netherlands, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, we find the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... diameter and projecting several feet above the surface of the water. The walls of this structure are often five or six feet thick, and the roofs are all finished off with a thick layer of mud laid on with marvellous smoothness. These huts form the winter habitations of the beavers, and as this compost of mud, grass and branches becomes congealed into a solid mass by the severe frosts of our northern winter, it can easily be seen that they afford a safe shelter against any intruder and particularly the wolverine, which is a most deadly enemy to the beaver. So ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... should be converted into manure. Fallen leaves, grass clippings, vegetable tops and roots, green weeds, garbage, house slops, dish water, chip dirt from the wood-pile, shavings—any thing that will rot away, should go into the compost heap. These should be saved, under cover if possible, in a compact heap and kept moist (never soaked) to help decomposition. To start the heap, gather up every available substance and make it into a pile with a few wheelbarrows full, or half a cartload, of fresh horse manure, treading ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... a great deal of money, and—wait five years! Vegetables dash out of the husbandman's garden to reappear at the city market. Madame Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that is at the same time a gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her land, beneath her glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice as much as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and taxes to pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts and pledges of the gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at Paris are a month in advance of those ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... had got that far, and debated the Idea in detail, and with amendment and resolve, it very greatly concerned them of what so admirable a compost should be mixed. Some said of this, and some said of that, but in the long run it was decided by the narrow majority of eight in a full house that Nothing was the only proper material out of which to make this World of theirs, and ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... exception. We can ride if we know how and are going her way, or we can be run over if we fall or make a mistake. Nature does not care whether the hunter slay the beast or the beast the hunter; she will make good compost of them both, and her ends ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... soil by carbonaceous matter were fully explained in a former section (p. 79, Sect. 2), and we will now examine merely its action with regard to manures. When properly applied to manures, in compost, ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... acre to L5 by this means', and 30 acres of cherries near Sittingbourne had realized L1,000 in one year. His recipe for making old fruit trees bear well savours of a time when old women were still burnt as witches. 'First split his root, then apply a compost of pigeon's dung, lees of wine, or stale wine, and a little brimstone'. The tithes of wine in Gloucestershire were 'in divers parishes considerably great', and wine was then made in Kent and Surrey, notably by Sir Peter Ricard, who made ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... 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 ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Harry got very much excited about this. They made the Scotch Gardener tell them what good soil ought to be made of, and all the rest of the day they talked of nothing but compost. Indeed Arthur would come into my room and talk about compost after I ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... touch of taste. Here also grateful mixture of well-matched And sorted hues (each giving each relief, And by contrasted beauty shining more) Is needful. Strength may wield the ponderous spade, May turn the clod, and wheel the compost home, But elegance, chief grace the garden shows And most attractive, is the fair result Of thought, the creature of a polished mind. Without it, all is Gothic as the scene To which the insipid citizen resorts, Near yonder heath; where industry misspent, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... light, sandy soil suits watermelons best. They can be grown on very poor soil if a good supply of compost be placed in each hill. The land for the melons should be laid off in about ten-foot checks; that is, the furrows should cross one another at right angles about every ten feet. A wide hole should be dug where the furrows cross, and into this ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... and non compost mentis, would help put it over with a man like Nelson; he'd set him in a draught while he was signing the option. I'll guarantee the seepage to last for a month, even if he has the well bailed out every day, and the creek will carry oil for ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... rudely pull his hand from the subject. Yet have you your uses like other things of earth. In life you are good working camels for the mill-track, and when you die your ashes are not worse compost ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... preparation have been made, or if the ground is hard, poor, and stony, the owner will find it to his advantage to dig a good-sized hole three or four feet across and two deep, filling in and around the tree with fine rich surface soil. If he can obtain some thoroughly decomposed compost or manure, for instance, as the scrapings of a barnyard, or rich black soil from an old pasture, to mix with the earth beneath and around the roots, the good effects will be seen speedily; but in no instance should raw manure from the ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... to pronounce. Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of the tone, with the subject-matter. The bleakest and most ghastly aspects of Nature,—the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life,—Irish servants and compost-heaps,—cows which try to consume their own milk,—beehives which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no honey,—soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated,—all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... are careful to utilise human waste products, no other manure is employed. There is an enormous consumption of chemical fertilisers. Then there are brought into service all sorts of crop-feeding materials, such as straw, grass, compost, silkworm waste, fish waste, and of course the manure produced by such stock as is kept.[42] In Aichi the value of human waste products used on the land is only a quarter of the value of the bean cake and ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... a governor of Jamaica. Six hundred thousand African slaves were introduced during the last century, of which number something over half remained at the beginning of this. Human blood flowed in fertilizing streams over the island, and out of this ghastly compost rose an opulence so splendid as to silence for generations all inquiry into its origin or character. It secured its possessors not only easy access, but frequent intermarriages among the aristocracy of England, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... of these savages from the discovery of a metallic conductor discharging its electric shocks, or a pile composed of many chemically-decomposing substances, or a light-engendering magnetic apparatus! In such a chasm lie buried thousands of years that compost the history of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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 a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... 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]
... set Bagley to work with the cart spreading upon the soil the barn-yard compost that had accumulated since spring. There was not enough to cover all the ground, but that I could not help. The large pile of compost that I had made near the poultry-house door could not be ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... Pk. Edible.—The Agaricus subrufescens was described by Dr. Peck from specimens collected on a compost heap composed chiefly of leaves, at Glen Cove, Long Island. It occurs sometimes in greenhouses. In one case reported by Peck it appeared in soil prepared for forcing cucumbers in a greenhouse in Washington, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... nor shepe to compost nor dung his land withall. Then let the husband take his ploughe, and cast al such landes three or four tymes togider, and make theyr rigge theyr as ye raine was before.... And so shel he finde new moulde, that was not sene in an hundred yeres before, the which must nedes gyue more corne ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... on the carpets, instead of your food. It's disgusting, it's beastly. You Yankees load your stomachs as a Devonshire man does his cart, as full as it can hold, and as fast as he can pitch it with a dung-fork, and drive off; and then you complain that such a load of compost is too heavy for you. Dyspepsy, eh! infernal guzzling, you mean. I'll tell you what, Mr. Secretary of Legation, take half the time to eat that you do to drawl out your words, chew your food half as much as you do your filthy tobacco, and you'll ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... 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, [72]Rising, Aery and moderately Perflatile Grounds; where not only ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... audience of the church for the first time. Who were the hearers? The majority of them were slaves; many had till a short time before been unconcerned about religion; in all probability not a tithe of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them? Not milk for babes; not a compost of stories and practical remarks; but the Epistle to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism. He must have believed that they would understand ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Dates in compost. Creme motley. Carpe. Dorrey. Turbut. Tench. Peerch with gogyns. Sturgeon fresshe. Welkes. Porpes rostid. Memise fried. Creves de ewe douce. Shrympes grosse. Elis with laumprons rostid. A Lessh callid the White Lessh, with ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... change into another kind. 1. The standing long and not being removed maketh them degenerate. 2. Drought unless the earth, of itself, be moist doth the like. 3. So doth removing into worse earth, or forbearing to compost the earth; as we see that water mint turneth into field mint, and the colewort into rape by ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... learns to transmute compost into grass and grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were led on through the stage of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... hen's mound, where the rich pink eggs were raked out by the gins. It was gin's work to overhaul the mounds; the boys did not like to do the digging with their hands, for often little snakes bedded themselves in the warm compost—snakes, though they bite not to the death, make one's hands big and sore. Why incur any risk when there was a well-disciplined woman to take it? There was a turn off (which was officially followed) leading to a huge tree where in the hollow bees had hived; ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... 1918. A critic has been mourning because good prose is not being written to-day. This surprised him, and he asked why it was that when poetry, which he pictured as "primroses and violets," found abundance of nourishment even in the unlikely compost these latter days provide, yet prose, which he saw as "cabbages and potatoes," made but ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... 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 ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... the eye of man never saw the earth, nor can it be seen without art. To make this element visible is the greatest secret in magic .... As for this feculent, gross body upon which we walk, it is a compost, and no earth but it hath earth in it .... in a word, all the elements are visible but one, namely, the earth: and when thou hast attained to so much perfection as to know why God hath placed the earth ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... infliction of Hell's armory it is to see another suffer! Why was it allowed, Anselmo? Did it come in the long train of a broken law? was it one of the dark places of Providence? or was it indeed the vile compost to mature some beautiful germ? Ah, then, is it possible that Heaven looks on us so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... to multiply, or produce fresh varieties, but the ordinary mode of increasing the different sorts is by cuttings, no plant growing more readily by this mode. These should be taken off at a joint where the wood is ripening, at which point the root fibres are formed, and put into a pot with a compost of one part garden mould, one part vegetable mould, and one part sand, and then kept moderately moist, in the shade, until they have formed strong root fibres, when they may be planted out. The best method is to plant ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson |
