Compost Benefits

Using compost in your garden is one of the best and most natural ways to help it grow. It’s almost like when you give yourself a huge dose of a multi vitamin to try to prevent a cold. While plants don’t get colds like us humans, they do get diseases and gardens and can easily become ill with a number of ailments. The good news is that composting helps prevent these problems by giving soil some of the best nutirents to make the soil as healthy and rich as possible.

Compost helps to enrich soil and to make it as healthy as can be. In fact, composting has numerous other benefits. Here are just a few as noted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Suppresses plant diseases and pests, reduces or eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers, promotes higher yields of agricultural crops, facilitates reforestation, wetlands restoration, and habitat revitalization efforts by amending contaminated, compacted, and marginal soils, provides cost savings of at least 50 percent over conventional soil, water, and air pollution remediation technologies, where applicable. Just think about it, a simple task like placing compost in your garden can help make such a positive impact on our environment.

With all these wonderful benefits to composting, you may be thinking… What exactly is compost? Compost is organic material that can be used as a soil amendment or as a medium to grow plants. Mature compost is a stable material that includes humus, a dark brown or black material that has a soil-like, earthy smell. It is created by combining organic wastes, such as yard trimmings, food wastes and manures with other materials such as wood chips. Composting can even be made at home by saving some kitchen scraps (such as vegetable peels), twigs and some dead leaves. Composting is a simple process that turns into a win-win-win situation. You win by saving money from not having to purchase compost, the environment wins from your use of natural fertilizer and your gardens soil wins with healthy soil.