Compost

Make Gold In Your Backyard

Professional gardeners and horticulturists will tell you that digging in rich dark soil often produces gold—black gold. And even a novice gardener can produce this black gold with simple, common materials such as grass clippings, vegetable peelings, fallen leaves, and kitchen scraps. So before you discard this material into the garbage, increasing our landfills, why don’t you start your own compost project. There is no shortage of books, with step-by-step instructions in your public libraries and, of course, online.

Quite simply, when organic grass clippings and vegetable peelings etc., are added in layers into a pile with garden soil, the material, after being turned several times, eventually breaks down into compost: a dark, nutrient rich soil. Nature, too, makes its own compost. For example, in our own backyard, grass cuttings and leaves and organic debris breaks down returning food to the soil.

Gardeners, farmers and environmentalists all have their reasons to compost. They reap the reward of composting with the rich, nutrient laden soil that they can then use in vegetable plots and flower gardens. Environmentalists point out that just one of the many benefits of composting lies in keeping this recyclable material out of our dumps. “Across most of North America, yard and food waste make up over a quarter of all the ordinary garbage we throw away.”1

Regardless if you live in a one bedroom apartment downtown, or on a 500 acre farm, composting is possible for everyone. All that is required is the motivation to get started today, and concern for the earth we share with every living creature.

1 https://www.planetnatural.com › environmental-issues › garbage-gripes