What Is Composting & Why Should You Care?
If you’ve never heard of composting before - or you’ve heard the term but you’re not really sure what it means - then you’ll want to pay attention for a minute.
Composting is simply the breaking down of, or decaying of, organic matter and material. In other words: Rotting :)
Gardeners and organic farmers have used compost for years, because it’s the equivalent of “black gold” for your plants. Compost is very rich in minerals and vitamins that are needed for plants to grow well. Compost can help flowers, vegetables, fruits, bushes, trees, and any other growing plant life to be healthier and produce more of a yield.
Now composting is also an excellent way to recycle and reuse things, so it’s been getting more notice by mainstream society in the past few years. Composting is a “green” activity, meaning that it’s more environmentally friendly because you’re not just throwing everything out to the landfills. Using compost also allows fruits and vegetables to be grown organically, which helps reduce or eliminate the use of harmful chemical fertilizers.
Composting is a completely natural process too. Away from urban civilization, plants and animals die all the time. And they’re not “picked up and put into the trash”. They simply lay where they fall, gradually rotting, decomposing, and mixing into the soil under them. This gradual rotting process is exactly what happens when people purposely set out to create compost on their own.
Making compost is quite easy too. Instead of throwing fruit and vegetable scraps into the dumpster behind your house for example, you simply add them to a compost bin. You can do the same thing with leaves and branches from your yard. Over time those organic materials will decompose and mix together to form rich compost which can be used in your garden.
This overview is fairly simplistic for the moment, and it is that way on purpose. There are many different ways to create compost, and many beliefs about what can or cannot be composted as well. And there are just as many ways to use the compost you create. As you can probably tell, there’s much more information about composting than can be fit into just one small introductory article, and that’s why this website is here. We’ll soon have many guides and tutorials which go much more in depth about the various ways of both making and using compost.
