By composting at home, you can reduce organic material sent to local landfills and create a healthy soil amendment for your garden, to grow healthy food! Home composting takes little time, space and effort. Give it a try – your plants (and pocketbook!) will thank you!
Backyard Composting Benefits:
- Compost returns nutrients to the soil, such as phosphorus, potassium, nitrogen, and many trace minerals, which are slowly released and contribute to healthy plant growth.
- Compost is a natural fertilizer.
- Compost suppresses weed growth and the improved soil condition makes it more difficult for weeds to anchor roots.
- Compost helps control erosion and protects plant roots from sun and wind damage.
- Compost increases water retention.
- Compost helps reduce soil diseases.
Backyard Composting and Green Organics Cart Composting
While you can put anything organic in your green cart, backyard composting is a little more exclusive. You can compost all fruit or vegetable scraps, breads and pastas, coffee grounds and filters, tea bags, eggshells and cereals. You cannot easily compost dairy, oils and fats, sauces, meats, poultry or fish at home.
Why not? The bacteria that do most of the work in a compost pile are aerobic bacteria, but the bacteria that thrive on meat, dairy and fats are anaerobic. Aerobic bacteria need oxygen and oxidize carbon compounds. There are many different types of aerobic bacteria, and when they work together they can eat nearly anything.
Anaerobic bacteria grow quickly in areas without fresh air and as they break down proteins they also produce some very smelly byproducts that can make a compost pile stink like rotten eggs or sour milk. These smells often attract scavengers and biting flies.
Large-scale composters grind up all the food scraps and landscaping material and have specially designed facilities to minimize odor and control scavengers.
