What is Garden Compost?

About Garden Compost

Just what is garden compost? Importantly, valuable compost is a gardener’s best friend. Without exception, it is beneficial to all plants. Organic compost contains a wealth of natural fertilizer (N-P-K), minerals, and micro-nutrients. These elements are vital to plant growth and health. Garden compost improves garden soil texture and the soil’s ability to retain water. It is used as mulch on top of the soil, too. Perhaps, best of all, compost is organic. Vegetables grown in it, are safer for you and your family to eat. So, defining garden compost is the first step to healthier food.

Everyone can and should compost vegetable matter from your kitchen and yard. It’s environmentally friendly. Composting is a vital part of the “Go Green” movement. By composting every vegetable scrap, less waste goes into the landfill. Even people who do not garden, like apartment dwellers, can participate in composting. You can add the finished product to houseplant soil, too. Or, collect the material and give it to someone who can use it.

The Composter’s Motto: Let it Rot!

Garden Compost Definition

Understanding the garden compost definition helps you to be both a more successful gardener, and an advocate for a healthier, eco-friendly environment. Garden compost is defined as any kind of decayed, organic plant waste. Compost is nutrient-rich in composition. It is a natural, healthy, organic fertilizer for your plants. Compost is also used as an organic mulch around any plant.

“Composting” is the process where organic plant matter decomposes….. it rots and decays. The material breaks down through the natural process of decomposition. What remains is a remarkable, rich soil amendment, that enhances your garden soil, and helps to improve plant health and productivity. Composting occurs over a period of time, aided by a combination of bacteria, air, heat, and water.

Worms can also play a role in the process of decomposition. When worms are used, the process is called “Vermicomposting“. The worms ingest vegetable matter and excrete an organically rich worm compost. Vermicomposting is also an organic process.

Composting refers to the process of rotting or decomposing plant matter. It can also refer to animal manure, which is also composted. Animal manure almost always includes a mixture of straw, sawdust, or other bedding material, along with nutrient-rich animal manure. More on composting manure

Why Should You Compost?

Compost helps plants to be all that they can be. Flowers produce more, bigger, and more colorful blooms. Fruit and vegetable plants are healthier and more productive.

Compost can help you to reduce or eliminate the chemical fertilizers you currently use in your garden.

Using less chemical fertilizers saves you money.

Compost by definition, is organic. That makes the vegetables grown in your garden healthier for you and your family to eat.

By sending fewer items to the waste stream, you are doing your part, big or small, for the health of the environment.

What to Compost

Compost is made from organic matter. it comes from kitchen scarp along with yard debris. It can include weeds, grass clippings, hay, seaweed, garden waste, kitchen scraps, tree leaves, sawdust, or branches, to name a few.

The more varied the plant matter, the wider the variety of micronutrients in the finished product.

Keep it Green….. A little care should be used to include only materials that are organic and have not been tainted with chemicals, or non-natural materials. For example, never use grass clippings that have been treated with herbicides or pesticides. as these chemicals can leach from the compost into the food you eat.