compost :: essays research papers

Compost is an easy solution to eliminating the waste that our environment brings, while at the same time, providing many benefits to us, and the environment. By using compost, it improves our plant growth by enriching the soil that it drinks its nutrients from. It helps us avoid buying soil amendments such as peat, bark mulch and bagged manure. Compost also loosens the heavy clay that is in our soil, while improving the capacity to hold water and adding essential nutrients.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Not only benefiting us, our involvement in making compost benefits the environment also. As if we already don’t have enough garbage filling our landfills, we certainly don’t need our yard waste to waste any more space when we can so easily handle it ourselves. Compost helps reduce the volume it could contribute to landfills. Why put it into the earth that way, when we can enrich it by turning our yard waste into a natural fertilizer? It also helps prevents us from purchasing pesticides and chemical fertilizers that could further damage the environment and the animals around us.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Compost is really easy; all that is needed is some fresh yard debris and rain. By yard debris, it includes the following: grass clippings, leaves, flowers, weeds, twigs, sawdust, eggshells and dryer lint. What we DO NOT want to compost is dairy products, meat scraps, animal fats, bones, dog and cat feces and diseased plants or fruits. These materials may attract dogs, rats or other animals. They may also develop an unpleasant odor during decomposition Weed plants heavily laden with seeds might be better left out of the compost pile if the compost is to be returned to the garden. Even though some seeds are killed during composting, there is the chance that some seeds will survive and create an unnecessary weed problem.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  There are fast and slow methods of composting. The speed that compost forms all depends on the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, surface area of particles, aeration, moisture, and temperature. Controlling these factors along with frequent turning of the compost speeds up the process. The fast composing methods depend on use of turning units. They can create good compost in less than six weeks, depending on how the compost pile is managed. The materials for fast composting should be added in larger quantities than many small amounts. In the slow method, material may be added to the enclosure at any time.