Can you compost roots

Making compost is one of the great organic gardening pleasures. Few experiences match delving into a heap to discover the black, crumbly goodness that has formed.

These collections do save precious nutrients and organic matter from going to landfill, turning it into useful compost, but it still has to be transported, with further energy expended in its processing and redistribution. Here are my tips for dealing with the usual offenders. Weeds with tough, perennial roots such as bindweed, couch grass and dock can be drowned by immersing them in a bucket of water for a few weeks; use a brick to weigh them down and ensure that they stay fully submerged. Once the roots have started to decay, they can be added to the compost heap and the foul-smelling but nutrient rich liquid can be used as a feed for container plants.

Before drying, weed roots can be tapped with a hammer to crush their structure, which can be quite a therapeutic activity! If you have a large number of perennial weeds with tough roots you may want to consider making a compost heap specifically for them.

I second Liz' advice on aggressive or persistent roots, especially the "resprout from the smallest little piece" types. I have bindweed in my soil and I wouldn't dare put it in the compost. I generally don't compost sod that I remove when digging new garden beds. Too much work to hack the clods into small bits so they don't overwhelm the pile and "clog things up" as Liz mentions. Also, unless your pile gets reliably hot, the roots won't be killed. To deal with sod and roots but not bindweed that might re-sprout if they're buried or turned, you can kill them first by shaking out as much of dirt as possible from each clump.

Then put the clumps upside down on a sunny hot driveway or tarp for a couple of days, or until they're crispy and dead. Then return the clumps to the garden bed, incorporating them into the top few inches of soil--the "decomposition zone".

Sometimes I use dead clumps of sod as mulch, especially in dry hot areas to keep the roots cool and preserve moisture. This can serve as a haven for slugs, though, so don't do this in a slug-prone area. Sometimes I just take all the "shaken" sod, along with any other springtime garden debris there's always scads of it and make a big pile.

In the past I used to cover the pile with a tarp to keep stuff from re-growing, but now I just leave it so the birds and wildlife can use it for cover. After a couple of years the pile will decrease in height as the twigs and things compact and decompose. Eventually you'll be able to spade it up, throw some triple mix on top, and use it for another planting spot.

A few years ago I took a bunch of sod and weeds and wet leaves and put them in a big black plastic contractors bag and let it sit for a year, just to see what would happen. I wondered if I'd get some useful organic matter or would it just be a stinky wet anaerobic mess. It was the latter. Very messy. Not a good idea. Comfrey and other deep-rooted plants are sometimes grown especially for the compost pile.

Their deep-ranging root systems capture nutrients, especially potassium, that can be useful in compost or in compost tea. It's a less green way of gardening, sure, but it's also more complicated and time-consuming: a lose-lose situation. Here are a couple of neat ways I've found to turn problem waste into an asset.

Perennial weeds are a big problem for me. While we have finally after seven years on the allotment beaten the couch grass back to a point where we can fool ourselves we have the upper hand, those roots do keep on coming. Couch grass, bindweed and dandelions all have thick, white, persistent roots. Put even the tiniest part of a root into the compost and it will spring into life and send its roots out through everything else in there. The best solution I have found is to drown them.

Those roots are stores of energy, so they take a long time to die, but dunked for several months in dustbins full of water, and they eventually rot down into a compostable mush. But what of all the nutrients those weeds took from the soil?

The water turns rich and nutritious, and starts to stink. It can be used in its raw form as a "weed tea" — a fertiliser to be diluted and watered on to plants — but I'm trying something else too: floating duckweed on the top. Scooped from the pond and added to my weed bins, the duckweed is right at home. It loves the nutrient-rich water and gorges itself on it which also helps to keep the stench down , rapidly spreading to cover the water.

It is also a great addition to the compost heap — just skim it off the surface and dump it on the pile, leaving a few pieces behind to re-grow. Composting Roots. Email Save Comment 4. Sort by: Oldest. Newest Oldest. Like Save. Related Discussions Oops! You need to post this query on Gardenweb, where the folks with compost under their nails hang out.

Good luck. I'm doing a similar thing with some rooting fig tree cuttings! I realize this is an old thread, but I wanted to throw this out there for anyone else who might be in the same situation. This article about water roots vs soil roots gives some pointers about moving water-rooted cuttings into soil. Basically there's a process to slowly and safely get the roots acclimated to soil. Riskier, but still usually works. Wha Q. Once it has been in a pot awhile it is pretty spent, You don't want it to go to a landfill but it isn't great for potted plants- they are needy You've answered your own question!!