Composting by Hand
For those without space (or money) for a composter or compost pile, there's still a great way to get "brown gold" into your garden and reduce your garbage flow: bury eggshells, banana and orange peels, beet and carrot tops - any fruit or vegetable scraps - under your planting beds in the fall. Dig down at least two feet before applying this future compost, though.
Better Sweet Potatoes
Readers might be interested in the results of my sweet potato trial in which I compared yields of potatoes grown with cow manure to yields of those grown with a synthetic fertilizer. Last year I planted one Georgia jet sweet potato plant and fertilized it with one shovelful of bagged cow manure. On the other side of the garden, I planted eight plants of the some variety but fertilized with the recommended amount of 8-24-24. For the first fifty days I watered every day then for the remaining fifty days did not water at all. From the single plant fertilized with manure, I harvested sixteen good-size potatoes and one jumbo potato. From the other eight plats together, I harvested only nine quite-large sweet potatoes. All of the potatoes were grown in beds raised fifteen to eighteen inches, to keep them from rotting in our area's wet soil. Also, I find it's important that soil pH be below 5.5 for sweet potatoes.
From Vera Milestone's book, "The Unbelievable Beauty" (copywrite Vera Milestone) available at http://www.veramilestone.com/