Compost is recycling. In taking food scraps, like apple cores or vegetable peels, and adding “brown matter” (coffee grounds, leaves, wood shavings), a powerful recipe is created. With compost, we can now fix ailing soil, and in the process create a better, nutrient-denser home for our plants.
Similar to people, plants need the right combinations of nutrients such as potassium, calcium and magnesium: they need a particular balance of “foods” to draw from their soil home-base in order to grow. The magic of compost is that we’re creating a substance that provides the right combination of nutrients for garden beds, so that plants can thrive to be their healthiest.
Healthy plants make healthy people. By speeding up nature’s process of breaking down plant and animal activity, you can sustainably create the ultimate in plant fertilizer for little effort and no cost.
Remember, it takes three parts brown matter (like the equivalent of a plastic grocery store bag filled with leaves) to account for one part food scraps (like your apple core) in order to jump start a successful compost pile. For more information, please see our video on Brown-Green Ratio:
Places you can find lots of brown materials are: in your local park, from local businesses (coffee shops, food processors, home warehouse suppliers), farms (for lots of spoiled hay and manure), and your backyard. Remember to chop up your brown materials really fine, so that they break down faster. The faster your greens and browns break down, the sooner you’ll have rich, dark soil food!
If you’d like an idea of where to store your compost pile, please see our video on Pallet Construction, or a sampling of the different kinds of bins that are out there.
Considering that food scraps make up an incredible 30% of our landfills[1], the act of composting is also an act of environmental sustainability. To be sustainable is to give back what you take from the planet – our global home. Composting is a sustainable act, because you’re not only helping to enrich the soil under your feet, but to reduce the transportation of trash in landfills and fertilizers in garden stores (and driving to the garden store for fertilizer). At hand, homemade compost gives you the kind of plant food that ten-fold increases your chances of food growing success.
