10 Amazing Benefits of Making Your Own Compost
The benefits of making compost at home aren’t limited to bigger, stronger, healthier plants. Homemade compost is cheaper, kinder to our planet, and gives you greater control over what goes into your garden.
Homemade compost also reduces the strain on landfill sites and local government waste disposal. And recently, gardeners have started turning to DIY compost in order to avoid plant-damaging or unwanted contaminants in bagged compost.
Here are all the ways that you – and not just your plants – stand to gain by making compost at home.
1. You Will Save Money
It makes sense that reusing kitchen and garden waste you already have to make compost is going to cost less than throwing it away and buying bagged compost instead. Making your own compost saves money on
- The cost of buying bagged compost at a store or garden center.
- Gas to drive it home, or delivery charges for having it brought to you.
- The cost of chemical fertilizers and soil improvers.
- Garden waste collection services, if you have to pay for them in your area.
- Buying trash bags
Even if you choose to buy a compost bin, the cost is usually recovered over time through reduced spending on compost and fertilizers.
2. You Will Improve Your Soil Structure
Homemade compost helps create soil that retains enough moisture for plants to thrive, while still draining well enough to prevent waterlogging. It does this by:
- Improving soil structure, to better achieve a favorable balance between drainage and moisture retention
- Helping to break up heavy, clay soils, and preventing erosion of light, sandy soils,
- Acting as a mulch to suppress weeds and conserve moisture in summer,
- Attracting earthworms, which aerate the soil and improve structure further
The chances are, you’re already aware of some of these benefits. But there is so much more to come!
3. You’ll Increase Nutrients For Healthy Plants
Compost is rich in nutrients and minerals that plants need to grow well. But even more importantly, it releases nutrients gradually.
This helps to support natural, steady growth rather than rapid bursts that can occur when using synthetic fertilizers, and which may weaken your plants.
4. You Will Help To Reduces Pressure On Peat Bogs
Peat has traditionally been used in commercial compost because it retains moisture well and is free from disease.
Peat is the decomposed remains of plants and animals that lived thousands of years ago. It’s dug up from specific geographical regions called peatlands or peat bogs. Historically it has been an important ingredient in bagged commercial composts because it is disease free, nutrient rich, and has the perfect spongy texture for roots to grow through. But since it takes thousands of years for peat to form, it is not renewable.
Digging peat up is releasing huge volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is contributing to climate change. In response to this some countries, like the UK, are putting restrictions on peat use. North America still uses 1,700,000 tons of peat a year, but making your own compost is one way that you can take the pressure off peat bogs and fuel your garden in a more sustainable way.
5. You’ll Be Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
Making your own compost doesn’t just reduce your carbon footprint by protecting peatlands, You’re also opting out of the carbon dioxide emissions produced by processing bagged compost. Including:
- packaging
- processing
- transportation
- retail storage
Most peat is still sold in plastic sacks, and transported over long distances from peat bog to factory to retailers. You’ll reduce your carbon footprint from all these production processes each time you don’t buy one!
6. You Will Reduce Methane Emissions From Food Waste
It’s tempting to think that food waste put out with the household trash turns into compost eventually anyway. Because isn’t that just what dead organic matter does? Well, not when you throw it out in a plastic bag!
Most food waste in landfill sites is sealed in trash bags, meaning there isn’t enough air inside for aerobic composting bacteria to decompose it. Instead, anaerobic bacteria flourish, and guzzle through the food, releasing methane as they go.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, around 30 times more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. And methane from food waste in landfill is making a significant contribution to global warming.
In fact, across the world, greenhouse gas emissions from wasted food are four times greater than greenhouse gas emissions from the airline industry! Changing that is going to require big changes in food production and how food manufacturers deal with waste. But we can all play an individual part too, by throwing out less, and composting more.
7. You’ll Minimise Microplastic Contamination
A decade ago, hardly any of us were thinking about microplastics, but they have been one of the buzzwords of the past few years. Microplastics are tiny fragments produced by larger plastic items breaking down. They are tiny and easily moved around by wind and water, and are almost unavoidable anywhere on Earth now. They have even been found in blood, breast milk and other human tissue.
We don’t yet know exactly what harm microplastics are doing to our environment but studies have shown that they can
- damage tissues
- disrupt hormones
- affect immune function
So everything we can do to reduce them has to be a good thing.
Microplastics are shed by actions as small as tearing open a plastic bag. Bagged compost which is stored for long periods can acquire sill more microplastic particles as the bag degrades. So making your own compost is one small choice you can make to reduce the quantity of microplastics in your garden.
8. You Will Avoid Herbicide Contamination
A couple of years ago, a gardener I follow on YouTube reported that the tomato seedlings they had grown in seed compost from the garden center were showing signs of aminopyralid poisoning. ‘Weird’ I thought, then forgot all about it. Until another gardener I follow reported the same, and then a third.
Aminopyralids are weed killers used in commercial farming. But, they also damage or kill tomato plants, potatoes, and beans. Unfortunately they’re very stable and immune to change from being eaten and digested. So there’s a growing problem with aminopyralids being sprayed onto crops that are used for cattle feed ending up in their manure, and ultimately in bagged composts.
Making your own compost gives you tighter control over what goes into it, and makes it easier to exclude herbicides.
9. You’ll Reduce Your Exposure To Unknown Chemicals
Aminopyralids are a specific example of an unwanted chemical in your commercial compost. But there’s also growing concern about how other long-lasting chemicals from household sewage, landfills, and manufacturing can find their way into bagged composts.
Some of these chemicals are potentially dangerous or toxic, and some environmental organizations are concerned that there’s insufficient monitoring of the extent to which they end up in bagged compost, soil improvers and fertilizers sold for domestic use.
Each of these benefits on their own justifies the switch to homemade compost. But together they have a most powerful effect and that is our final benefit.
10. Composting Is Good For The Soul
Finally, lots of gardeners – myself included – believe that making our own compost brings us closer to our garden. Turning garden and kitchen waste back into next year’s growing medium completes the cycle of growth and decay that sustains all living things.
It’s deeply satisfying and rewarding to achieve the whole cycle in your own garden. And it can be physically good for you too – turning a 3′ x 3′ pile on a regular basis is a real work out (and cheaper than that gym membership you’ll never use)
I’d like to think my epitaph will read, “She composted well.” I take it very seriously. I see a direct correlation between compost and quality of life.
Alys Fowler, British horticulturist and journalist
Learning to compost is a skill. It doesn’t happen just because you dumped everything in a heap. It requires some learning, a bit of knowledge, trial and error, and the accumulation of experience to get reliably good at it. And gaining new skills through effort and application is great for our self esteem.
In short, producing some of your own compost – even just a little in a tumbler or wormery – can help you to feel more connected to your garden and improve your wellbeing. So give it a go! Let us know how you’re going to get started in the comments box down below.
