DO MORE - Compost and Worm Farms
Using compost is one of the best ways to organically put nutrients back into the soil in any garden. Soil rich in nutrients can improve plant health, reduce the need for artificial fertilisers, and encourage worms to naturally reside in your garden.
Composting and worm farms are two simple ways to minimise waste. Composting benefits the environment by reducing landfill space through recycling organic matter. It also saves water by allowing the soil to hold moisture. Worm farms can also save water by tunnelling and creating ‘mini water ways’ to enable water, air and nutrients to circulate. This means a reduction in leachate, which is water pollution, and therefore less water needed when watering the garden.
By incorporating compost and worm farms into residential developments, it can reduce the amount of food waste that ends up in landfill every year and methane emissions. This is because food waste often ends up in landfill which generates methane, a type of greenhouse gas. Composting food waste and other organic matter such as tea bags or even newspaper (shredded), in a residential garden, can reduce the amount of methane emission released into the environment. With this in mind, it is important that composting is done correctly in residential areas, the following points are good to follow for safe measure:
Chop compost into 2-to-3-centimetre pieces for timely composting
Keep compost damp-moist never soak
Never compost dairy products, diseased plants, weeds, or animal products
Aerate your compost using a small shovel
If you don’t have a garden, you can give your compost to a friend or donate it to a community garden
Conversely, worm farms go hand in hand with composting because they eat soil, organic matter and food scraps and then decompose all this matter in natural, earth friendly fertiliser. When you recycle your food scraps you are really creating something new from something old… because when worms recycle food waste, they decompose this into nutrient rich soil for gardens.
In hindsight, composting and incorporating worm farms is environmentally important to reduce the amount of landfill, which in turn minimises air pollution (methane gas) and water pollution (leachate).
