If you haven't started composting to build better soil in your flower and vegetable gardens, there's no better time to begin. As the
world population continues to grow and landfills overflow with piles of trash, composting most of your home waste products is a simple
solution to make your planet a cleaner and healthier place to live. It won't solve the whole problem of waste disposal, but with more and more
people starting to compost their own wastes it will certainly make a huge dent in the amount of home and yard wastes ending up in
landfills.
Understanding Compost
If this is your first exploration into composting you'll need to have a basic understanding of what compost is. We'll start by explaining
how vegetative decomposition occurs in nature to help give you a better idea of how compost comes about. Leaf mold
is the result of a decomposition process that happens naturally in the environment all around us. You may have noticed this when you kicked
around some leaves at the foot of a tall tree in the woods and the soil beneath the leaves had a dark and fine textured appearance. Not
at all like what you'd see when digging up dirt with a shovel in your backyard. If not previously disturbed, the leaves under that tall
tree have likely been there for years on end. Each and every year the tree sheds its leaves to cover the previous years' leaves and that
makes an ideal environment for the decomposition process to occur. Periodic rainfall provides moisture which is very important. The newer leaves
covering the older leaves work as a mulch to help preserve that moisture. The microorganisms in the soil are free to do their job of
breaking down the leaves and any other organic material that falls to the ground, but only when conditions are favorable. That's one of
the many reasons it takes so long for the decomposition process to happen naturally.
What we call composting is actually a near duplication of the natural process, but our objective when making compost is to make conditions in the compost pile even
more favorable for the decomposition process to occur rapidly. How do we do that? We make sure that the moisture levels in the compost pile or our
compost bins are at levels we know to be conducive to the microorganisms living in the compost. We make sure that the microorganisms have the
proper balance of carbon and nitrogen in the pile so that they can efficiently degrade the organic materials in as little time as
possible. We make sure that the pile doesn't go anaerobic by monitoring what is happening with the compost and occasionally introducing
more oxygen to the compost pile or compost bin by turning it with a compost fork or whatever else we might have available. So you can see
that although compost happens naturally, our goal is to make it happen in vast amounts and quicker than it would normally happen in nature.
