In Maryland we are about halfway through the growing season here ( I guess everyone in the northern hemisphere is). Anyway, I learned some things about my experiments this year. Earlier this spring I put a bunch of compost at the base of my Fig (Celeste) and Mulberry trees but not my mint patch (on the advice of some website or book that said the mint "wont miss it").
The most practical reason I have found for composting is that it makes edibles more tender. Wood is made from carbohydrates (cellulose), which requires lots of carbon to make. When a leaf or fruit is "woody" it has too much carbon in it as a result of not having enough nitrogen available to produce leaves or fruit properly.
Last year we were really disappointed in the mulberries our tree produced they had very woody centers that had to be spit out they were so hard. This year, I poured 1-4 cubic feet of compost at the base and I noticed the difference months later when the berries came in. They were much sweeter and much softer. Even better, they didn't have those plentiful little gnat-like bugs running around in them.
My neighbor is much more of a farmer than I am, and he gave us a bunch of beets in early spring. When all the stores and farmers markets had wonderful sugary beets with soft lovely greens (which I like a lot more than the actual beets), his greens were woody and the bulbs kind of tasteless. I don't know if those had been composted, but he basically has the same soil I do, the useless kind. I saw his compost pile a few weeks before he gave me the beets. It is based off of coffee grounds and newspaper that he gets from Starbucks and newstands around the area. It had ants in it and was very dry. If that's what the beets were made of then I would say that his pile had too much carbon in it and not enough nitrogen. Regardless, the beets were woody.
Edibles need compost to be tasty.
Oh yeah, and compost makes them grow about twice as fast in my experience.
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