What’s your compost doing right now?

There’s a special day or week to raise awareness for everything, isn’t there? Earth Day, Administrative Assistants Day, Ride to Work Day, Space Week. Well, gardeners and greenies rejoice – there’s an International Compost Awareness Week too! I first heard about it from Tricia at Little Eco Footprints.

My compost bin

The idea is to get more people to understand how awesome compost is. And they’re right – I love our compost bin and am really glad we started one. We’re hoping to start a second one, so they’ll take turns at being filled then resting while the microbes do their work.

Composting has huge benefits for your garden:

• it improves your soil texture and fertility
• it helps your soil hold on to water, very important during water restrictions
• plants grown in compost-rich soil are stronger and healthier, so they need less of those poisonous pesticides
• keeping your kitchen and garden scraps is much cheaper than buying soil improvers and pesticides from garden centres

It’s also really great for the environment, because:

• healthier plants need less pesticide to fight off insects, and less chemical fertiliser, so there’s less contamination and run-off into waterways
• anything that reduces water use is great in these dry times
• your kitchen scraps get recycled instead of adding to methane-producing landfill

The ICAW website has information about home, commercial and farm composting. They’ve also got several events happening around Australia so you can see how it’s done by the experts, or get a tour of large-scale composting facilities. There’s a ball and industry awards too!