Photo credit: www.gardeners.cocm
Are you composting?
Compost is important — it enriches your soil and gives your plants a vitamin boost that’s quite potent. That crumbly black stuff coming out of your compost bins makes for a healthy, thriving garden which means lots of tomatoes and beans and cucumbers and more.
I will tell you honestly that I didn’t start composting until last year. Given that I’ve been gardening for more than 15 years, one would think that I would have been composting all along, but for some reason I didn’t have compost bins scattered around my yard. I shudder when I think of all those food scraps going to waste.
My household of four used to produce around three bags of trash every week. Now that we’re directing our food scraps to the compost bin, we’ve cut our trash output to only 1-2 bags per week.
Nationwide, a typical household throws out 474 pounds of food a year — that’s nearly 26 million tons of food scraps ending up in landfills annually!* The E.P.A. actually estimates that food scraps and yard trimmings make up around 25% of U.S. trash production. **
Think about how much food you throw out every day and throughout the week. Now multiply that by 100 families or 1,000 families and imagine the difference that composting can make.
Composting is so important that it’s now mandatory in San Francisco and the new composting programs have been wildly successful.
Are you ready to compost now? To get started, check this article at Organic Gardening.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I am not composting yet – but this summer the plan is to construct some sort of compost bin that will suit our tiny space. I have never been so excited about dirt in my life!
Thanks Jen -
What kind of bins are you using? I love my Earth Machine, and would like a couple more if I could find a good price.
Elizabeth, I’m using a couple from Lowes and I have to admit that I’m not happy with them. They’re the black plastic kind, with doors on all four sides, which the squirrels and raccoons have been able to open numerous times. I propped rocks again the doors to keep varmints out, so they tried to get in through the locking tops. They were successful, so now I have rocks on the tops too.