It's fine for the compost pile, and yes it would probably be a great addition to compost tea. I'm not a worm expert but I think it may not be good for the worm bin.

I would just throw it away. Jam and Jelly will attract rodents and it is slow to break down.

I'd shove it on the compost heap. Bury it under a few layers of other stuff.

On the other hand - how old is it? I use my old preserves in gravy.

Thank you toxcrusadr. I think that is what I'm going to do. I will dilute the jelly in a few gallons of water and make compost tea with worm castings. That sounds good.

floral_uk, its pretty old. lol they got shoved to the back of a top shelf at my grandmothers house somehow. We found them when she was giving me a bunch of her empty mason jars for canning. Some of the jars are the 1976 bicentennial addition. I do not think the jelly is quite that old, but it might be. lol I might ought to donate them to the science department for study. :)

Crikey - that is historic. The oldest I can claim is 2002.

It's mainly sugar and water, and a few flavors. No nitrogen in sucrose. It's all C, O, and H. So when it breaks down, there won't be much of any value. I think the bacteria you want to cultivate don't have a sweet tooth.

Melt it in some warm water and dump it on the compost heap.

Worms may not care about sugar but they certainly do love to feast on the organisms that grow on sugar and starch. And soil microorganisms that partner with plant roots, of course, live on the sugar that the plant roots exude for them. So adding some extra sugar to the soil won't hurt and can be beneficial, provided you dilute it well with water so that it is no longer concentrated enough to rupture cell wells via osmotic pressure (which is why very concentrated sugar solutions act as a preservative). No need to get fancy about brewing it up as a "tea" or anything like that. I'd just dissolve it in a bucket of water and pour it on. Maybe, though, depending on your climate, don't do this in winter since there is so much less soil biological activity going on and plants aren't actively growing to benefit from it.

I wouldn't be bothered about putting the jelly in the worm bin, either, but diluting it enough with water while simultaneously not waterlogging or flooding your worm bin could be difficult. If you put it in there in blobs or chunks I think you'd get a fine fungal or mold bloom before the worms could get to work on it, which could be icky but wouldn't ultimately harm anything.

I think that's just asking for invasion by a gazillion ants and perhaps other bugs. The bacteria are going to eat the proteins in the compost mix, so dosing them with a lot of sugar is somewhat of a distraction. I believe that sugars will also encourage the development of human pathogens like E. coli and Salmonella. Those organisms certainly aren't going to help your compost pile, but fresh manure, if you're using it, is rich in them.

I think sugar cane farmers compost their stuff by innoculating the mix with specific bacteria that are not common in the wild, but thrive on the sugary cane remnants.

If you can't think of anything else to do with the stuff, sure, dump it on the pile, but I don't think there is any credible evidence that it will speed up composting. It certainly won't add any nutrients. There are folks who swear on molasses on compost piles, but their arguments strike many as hand-wavey.

What part of your body are you waving when you worry about microorganisms getting "distracted"? Perhaps it's time to hit the books and review the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle both.

If you want 'em to eat sugar, drop sugar on them. If you want 'em to eat organic proteins, then just leave them with that and maybe add some nitrogen.

I welcome some real study that examines the value of application of sugar to compost.

I should add that it occurs to me that sugars are highly soluble in water. So whatever sugars you add to compost are going to leach out of it pretty effectively. You may end up just feeding bacteria in the topsoil under the compost pile.

Oh, I agree that it's pointless to go out and buy molasses to make complicated brews and that sort of thing. But that is not what we are discussing. We are discussing making a little use of some minor unwanted material around the house that would otherwise go to waste. Sugars are "junk calories" to us but they are an extraordinarily valuable medium of nutrient exchange in the natural world, so one might as well look for a use for the stuff instead of consigning it to the drain.

What do you mean by "organic proteins"? I'm guessing you weren't a chemistry major.

Organic nitrogen sources are proteins, such as you get in compostable "greens", among other things. That's common terminology in agricultural science. The word "organic" here is not used to describe "au naturel" stuff, but stuff that is not a chemical source of nitrogen, like urea, that breaks down very rapidly. Organic proteins are stuff that bacteria need to chew on to get nitrogen out. That's precisely what happens in compost.

I agree that if you want to dispose of sugar, you could just throw it out back. If it lands on the compost pile, I'm just saying that it isn't clear it will really do much good. Sugar offers no nutrient value to plants in the compost that is produced. Sugars are not necessarily a valuable medium of nutrient exchange for the particular bacteria that chew on proteins. But again, I welcome a real study that investigates this.

To the extent that it attracts bugs, yes, I might want to consign it to the drain.

The idea is to not throw it into the landfill or down the drain. It's not that it's super beneficial to the garden. Composting is not only for making compost for the garden, but a means to divert wastes to beneficial use.

Sugar, having no nitrogen as stated, is a brown for composting purposes. It may not have any 'nutrients' in terms of NPK, but compost needs carbon too.

As far as leaching out rapidly, yes it would if things are very wet, but at least it's returned to the soil and not wasted. It will also decompose just as rapidly. In fact, there is another thread going here about the supposed benefits of adding a concoction that includes Coke to the compost pile to boost microbial activity. While I generally don't subscribe to making garden concoctions out of foods and household chemicals, it's a well known fact that sugar feeds many types of microbes.

Which brings us to pathogens: I personally have never heard of sugar encouraging human pathogens in the compost any more than other microbes. They generally don't like aerobic composting conditions, and I would think boosting aerobic microbial activity would do nothing helpful for anaerobic pathogens. It could be legit, I've just never heard of it.

Fair point about pathogens. My own point wasn't that sugar encourages pathogenic bacteria more than non-pathogenic bacteria. It was that it may artificially encourage both.

As a "brown", a bottle of sugar sure isn't going to contribute much carbon to a compost pile.

By the same token, a bottle of sugar in your drain probably just feeds the bacteria in the sewage processing system. So it's not as if it will not be used beneficially unless maybe you don't have a sewage treatment system. To the extent that it helps your compost, it will help break down material in a landfill.

Sugars are the primary food of most soil bacteria. Chemically it makes no difference to them whether sugars come from a bag of Domino's, exude from a plant's roots or ooze from your discarded apple cores. I think some vague concerns about the "artificiality" of refined sugars being somehow harmful in the soil are being overstated or invented here. You don't see a lot of sugars being applied to soil at scale because sugars/carbohydrate are usually too valuable for other uses - if not for direct human consumption, then for fermentation, biofuels, etc. However, there are some exceptions, like surplus skimmed milk which cannot find a market being directly applied to soil, which some farmers are doing in order to feed soil bacteria.

As I've mentioned here numerous times before, in my city they make a big point of *wanting* you to put food garbage into the sewers rather than into the landfill trash, to the point of making it a code requirement in new construction that garbage disposals must be installed in kitchens. (Since I spent most of my adult life in California this idea still fries my circuits, because of the water it uses.) They're making and using biogas from the sewage treatment process, whereas the garbage just costs the city money to haul and landfill. As they say, it's not waste unless you waste it. (The highest and best use for food scraps at my house, of course, is to go into a box of very fat and happy worms, but I acknowledge that not everyone is cut out to be a worm-herder.)

@theparsely, thanks. I didn't know of any places that encouraged homeowners to put food garbage in the sewers. It makes sense if the sewer system can handle it - that is, compared to the cost and issues with landfill. (I imagine they'd still prefer you feed it to your worms, but that may not scale well to city-level).

Sugars speed up the decomposition of woody materials; if you have any stumps that need to be "rotted", pour sugary junk on them;

it's amazing how quickly wood turns into mushy, pulpy, mushroom-growing "stuff".

Old sugared tea or coffee, yucky jams & jellies, flat sodas, moldy fruit juice. anything. micro-critters aren't particular.

(A former neighbor would *buy* a 5-pound bag of sugar whenever her husband removed a tree or shrub; she poured the whole bag onto the stump & watered it in.)

That's interesting, sylviatexas. The usual 'grouping' is sugars (carbons) and nitrogen-rich stuff - and hence for a stump / woody materials, the usual recipe is to add nitrogen. But personally and from some experience (like yours), I think that usual grouping is too simplistic - it ignores the fact that some sugars/carbohydrates (lignin, cellulose) are much harder to break down. My own theory for why your recipe works: the more simple microbes that invade to break down the simple sugars 'bring their nitrogen with them', and die and multiply and die and provide the nitrogen the 'lignin consumers' need. In other words, they start the cycle moving, primed by the simple sugars. Anyway, just a theory, but it strikes me frequently our simple rules of thumb don't capture the process fully. And adding simple sugars like glucose does seem to prime the pump or whatever analogy one prefers.

The idea of dumping sugar on a stump to aid stump decomposition is an interesting one. But after a rainstorm or two, that sugar is pretty much gone. Perhaps even before the bacteria get cranking. So I guess if one can manage to keep the sugar on the wood, and keep it moist without washing it off, it could work. My understanding is that slow-release high nitrogen lawn fertilizer, or just pelletized potassium nitrate is the way to go. Slightly pricier than sugar, however. If that plain old pelletized potassium nitrate comes in a bottle that says "stump remover", that'll double the price!

Must be a slow day.

Waiting for a stump to degrade, every day is a slow day!

I would agree it's better to put veggie waste down the drain than into the landfill, but of course WE don't do either one. Those are #3 and #4 behind composting and worm bins.

The best way to speed up stump decomposition is to split it and keep it wet.

Another skeptic about sugar in compost.

http://www.gardenmyths.com/molasses-for-plants/