Composting - what is it and what are the benefits?

For many people, composting is just an alternative way of dealing with rubbish. It prevents the garbage bin from getting full and smelly. It’s also a way of disposing of grass clippings and leaves, which saves many trips to the garbage depot. Whilst these things are valid, they are not giving compost the full credibility it deserves. Compost can be very valuable when used in the right way.

We should have a completely different way of looking at compost. Composting is a way of building valuable nutrients that will, one day, feed you and your family. Growing vegetables using compost is the best way to create a whole food production system. Creating compost allows to collect nutrients in one form (waste), and to turn them into another form (food).

In a sense, it is a way of keeping the nutrients within your property so that you can capitalize on them. By doing this, you are able to use the nutrients again, so that you don’t have to buy them for a second time. Surely, that’s going to save you money. It may seem strange to think of nutrients in this way when we can’t even physically see them. However, all organic materials contain nutrients. The goal is to get those nutrients out of the form they are in and into a form that is useful to you.

To achieve this, the size of your vegetable garden should be determined by how much compost you can create, and not merely by the amount of space you have in your backyard. Growing vegetables in a rich, high yielding garden requires some sort of soil conditioning plan, and the best thing for your soil is a generous layer of good compost on the surface a few times per year.

Most gardening books will praise compost, but often as an adjunct and not as part of a complete self-sustainable system. But the truth is that if you can create your own compost from the organic waste that you generate in your everyday life, then you can have a vegetable garden that is self-sustainable. Once it is set up, it will never need nutrients in the form of store-bought fertilizers. You will have established a flow of nutrients, and your nutrient-store will grow bigger and bigger, year after year. Applying compost to your garden will have a very positive effect on your soil structure and fertility. You will be able to grow vegetables which contain all the essential nutrients in the correct proportions, giving your body the vitamins and minerals it needs to function at its best.

Composting is very easy once you make it part of your everyday life. A small container on your kitchen bench to collect scraps and a daily trip to the compost bin is all it takes. It’s a small effort for huge rewards. The golden rule in making compost is never to have large clumps of a single type of material. Thin layers of hot and cold materials work best. Cold materials include leaves, shredded newspaper and dried grass clippings. Hot materials include fresh grass clippings, manures, weeds, discarded soft plants and kitchen scraps.

If you make composting part of you daily routine, along with an effective method of growing vegetables, you can literally save thousands of dollars per year. This is possible simply because you won’t have to keep buying nutrients over and over. You will buy them once, hold onto them and then convert them into useful forms again and again. It’s that simple!

Photo by Anne Norman