Gardening: Healthy Soil and Living Compost

The most important part of gardening might not be your produce, but rather, your soil.

In fact, soil quality and health determine the size of your harvest, and monitoring it is the best way to sustainably maintain and improve the health of your land—so you can keep getting the most of it. 

The first, most important step to maintain soil health is to recycle your unused food scraps. Think of all the food you throw away every day. The USDA estimates that, as a nation, we waste roughly 30 to 40 percent of our food—an insane amount of wasted water, time and energy. 

Compost to the rescue.

Composting provides the easiest way we can re-use and recycle our waste. Even for the very eco-friendly of us who never throw food away, even you can save more by composting. Think of all the egg shells, corn husks and orange peels that get thrown away every day. You may not be able to eat this part of the food but the earth can! 

Don’t landfills just compost our organic waste anyway? No, they don’t. In fact, organic waste in landfills creates methane—and lots of it. Another reason to consider composting at home. 

Compost acts as a carbon absorber. It also increases water retention in your soil so you need less for similar results. It also restores and revitalizes the microbiome life in your soil so you get more crops. And, it reduces, and can even remove entirely, the need for chemical fertilizers. 

Don’t know where to start with composting? Watch this quick video for a tutorial. 

Why can’t I just fertilize my plants once a month and be done with it?

Yes, fertilizer may give you bigger crop yields, faster and cheaper. That is why big agriculture firms use it so intensively. However, when compared to compost, in addition to their quick positive results, fertilizers produce many negatives. 

For starters, common nitrogen-based fertilizers are produced from a process involving lots of natural gas: The US alone used 319 billion cubic feet of natural gas for nitrogen fertilizers in 2004. 

The process is also very dirty. Nitrogen fertilizer production not only produces insane quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases but also many other products which create areas around factories considered “cancer alleys.” 

Fertilizers can kill your soil. Or worse.

Synthetic fertilizers also tend to kill much of the microbiome life in your soil. While this produces fast results, it negates your ability to be a steward and to increase the health of your local environment. 

Instead, with composting, you’ll see increasing yields the longer you do it. It creates a cycle of independence for your soil and your crops. Synthetic fertilizers create a cycle of dependence in which the soil gets so badly damaged that it needs chemicals to produce anything at all.

But wait, it gets worse. Chemical fertilizers do not only damage soil locally, pollute the air and create cancer alleys around their locales of production, they also seep into fresh water supplies.

Phosphorus- and nitrogen-based fertilizers never get fully absorbed into the soil. They often get washed away with rains into water systems. Nitrogen runoff is associated with many areas of the ocean becoming oxygen deficient and being unable to support life.  

Green lakes aren’t really green.

Phosphorus runoffs in the United States have led to almost half of all our lakes becoming eutrophic. This means that a body of water has so many nutrients that algae blooms in massive amounts.

Ever seen a green lake? That is what excessive algae bloom looks like. While pretty, these blooms are very destructive to local ecosystems and can even produce toxicities dangerous to fish, animals, and humans.

So, compost. And feel good about it.

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