Compost accelerating products usually contain the bacteria and assorted enzymes that break down the compost faster (some only contain nitrogen). A cheaper one might have a more dilute mixture, or it might just be a better deal - it's hard to tell.

If you have a working compost pile, then you can just toss a bit of that into the new batch and it'll do the same thing for considerably less money. This is what I do - it's cheaper and my thoughts are the more I spend on other things, the less I have to spend on plants! I do small batch cold composting and that is exactly the sort of thing accelerators are great for, but I find stuff still breaks down just fine without it.

Of course it'll be slower if you use old compost as your innoculant, but not by much - if you need compost now, then go ahead and buy it if it's cheaper than the stuff you were using before. But check what's in it - if it's just urea or some other form of nitrogen, skip it and buy your old stuff or buy a bag of lawn fertilizer for even less. Or skip it all and buy another plant :-)

BP

Hi Donna:

BP has excellent advice as usual. I am about to try using horsetails (impossible to get rid of so one might as well do something with them). You boil them up (outside, I presume) and add the resulting tea to your compost. It is supposed to work even better than commercial products. If you have horsetails it would be worth giving it a shot.

Cheers,
MG

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