Cambridge Botanical Gardens (Compost Corner) 4

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Cambridge Botanical Gardens (Compost Corner) 4

This is the last part of this series of blogs on composting – but I wonder now if it shouldn’t have been the first!

Why is it a good idea to compost?

Composting is a form of recycling that benefits your garden & the environment.

- Up to 30% of our waste can be composted.

- It reduces landfill & pollution.

- Without much effort, it can save you money.

Reasons to compost

Good soil is the key to successful gardening. Digging in compost helps your garden grow. It:

- Improves soil structure which helps drainage & aeration, encouraging healthy root growth.

- Encourages good populations of worms & other soil organisms.

- Improves soil fertility.

- Helps the soil retain moisture.

Composting saves you money as it reduces the need to buy:

- Chemical fertilizers.

- Soil improver.

- Mulches.

By home composting, gardeners can contribute to protecting the environment by:

- Reducing the amount of organic waste that goes into landfill sites.

- Reducing the need for chemical fertilizers.

- Eliminating the need to use peat as a soil improver, as compost is an excellent alternative. Peat bogs are among the UK’s rarest habitats & 94% have been lost. Reducing the demand for peat helps conserve these areas.

Reasons to recycle

- 75% of all rubbish gets buried in the ground.

- Our household waste is rising at an average of 3% a year.

- 80% of our rubbish could be recycled.

We need to break the trend of sending 3% more rubbish to landfill each year, although 80% of it could be recycled. This is bad for the environment & wastes money. Soon, there will be no land left where we can bury waste.

Sustainable living

You can help our environment by reducing waste through considering what we can re-use, what we can recycle & which materials can be composted.

I hope you will have found these blogs of help if you have been considering what to do about the mounting bins of rubbish we seem to produce every year. Have felt concern for the environment but had little, practical idea of how you, yourself, could do anything to contribute to its improvement.

These blogs may also be of help to gardeners who have practised composting their vegetable waste for years to see other ways of making their composting even more environmentally friendly.

Or who perhaps haven’t been too satisfied with the quality of their compost to see where they may be going wrong or to consider other ways of improving the quality of what they produce. Thereby increasing the fertility of their soil & the quality/quantity of the produce, be it in the flower garden or veg plot.

• 21 Nov, 2010
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