sugar?

I am getting ready to make plum jelly and my recipe calls to soak the fruit in sugar to extract juices, can I use the fruit pulp on the compost pile after?

Goodness, I do.

I don't know anything about making jelly, but why do you have to throw away the fruit pulp? Can't it be used for eating in some fashion?

Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe fruit leather? I'll check into it, waste not, want not!

Excuse my ignorance, but leaving it in would just make it jam, right?

yes.on the jam. or eat it for fiber. wet prunes maybe?lol

The sugar will help feed the soil microbes.

By all means put it in the compost pile. I agree that sugar really gets the microbes going.

When I start a new compost pile, I layer green material like grass clippings or corn stalks with brown material like last year's chopped up oak leaves. Then I pour a can of SODA POP in my Miracle-Gro hose sprayer - cola like Coke or Pepsi is fine, and spray it on the pile.

The cola is sticky so it adheres to the plant particles as it soaks through the pile - and the sugar in just 12 oz. of soda gets bacteria started and the pile cooking real fast.

Many folks use beer the same way.

"Many folks use beer the same way."

Beer wouldn't be a good compost starter, in my opinion. I'm a brewer, too.

Unfermented beer is a rich broth of many nutrients and natural sugars, and microorganisms love it. That's why you have to be so careful with sanitation in brewing. The idea is to let brewer's yeast consume those sugars, and not the other micro-critters.

After fermentation, the sugars in beer are gone and the only nutrients remaining are unconverted starches and dextrins. Those don't appeal much to bacteria, except to acetobacter - the bacteria that makes vinegar. Getting acetobacter started in a compost pile would make the pile go sour and acid, the last thing you want.

Also, the 3-to-5% content of ethyl alcohol in beer is pretty unfriendly to bacteria. If anything, I'd think adding beer would inhibit, rather than help, the microorganisms in a compost pile. Soda pop would work much better.

Would it matter, do you think, if we used stale beer that had been left out, open for a while, Ozark? Or are we better off using that for slug bait?

"Would it matter, do you think, if we used stale beer that had been left out, open for a while, Ozark?"

I think I'd just leave beer out of the compost pile. At best, it wouldn't hurt anything in the pile - but there's just nothing left in beer that would help much.

Yeast has already consumed the sugars in beer, and they're gone. The sugar got changed into CO2 gas (which bubbled off) and alcohol (which evaporates in the open air). That leaves just water and a little bit of starch for the compost pile.

Think of it this way - beer and bread are exactly the same thing, the only difference is that bread is much less liquid and its' alcohol was driven off during baking.

So - if you'd soak a slice of bread in a quart of water, then pour that water on a compost pile, that's just like adding beer to the pile. It wouldn't hurt anything, but it wouldn't do any good either.

If you do encourage a microorganism that way, what always eats the starch in stale bread and stale beer? Mold.

I'd much rather just keep the beer cold and drink it after I've been shoveling compost around. lol

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation. I'm married to one of those folks who never finishes a drink, just leaves the half empty bottle laying around, so I try to find some good way of utilizing it.

Ah well, moving on tothe the next bright idea!