Interesting Facts About Composting

Dried leaves can be added to compost piles whole or shredded first.


One of the nicest things you can do for your garden is to supply it with homemade compost. Not only does compost build the health and disease resistance of your garden plants, but it helps your pocketbook by reducing waste disposal costs and trips to the landfill to dispose of yard and garden trimmings and organic waste. You don't need to purchase expensive organic additives or fertilizers to build up the garden soil. Composting needn't be complicated or fancy to get good results.

Public Benefits

Public waste disposal is getting more difficult and more expensive, with reduced land available for large public landfills in convenient areas, leading to more money spent in oil and gas to haul the waste away. Composting reduces what goes to landfills, leading to less methane production and more room in the landfill. Every metric dry ton of food in a landfill can generate .25 metric tons of methane in the first 120 days. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generated 33.4 million tons of yard trimmings and 34.7 million tons of food scraps in 2010, which amounts to 27 percent of the total municipal solid waste generated.

Garden Benefits

No matter what kind of soil you have, adding compost to your garden soil regularly improves the soil fertility, consistency, drainage and health. You build up the beneficial microorganisms at work in the soil. Healthy soil has more microorganisms in a teaspoonful of soil than there are humans alive on the planet. Adding organic matter such as compost to soil improves its water-holding capacity. An acre of soil can hold an additional 16,000 gallons of water for every 1 percent of organic material added.


Traditional composting advice is to have a ratio of 2 parts brown, or dry, ingredients to 1 part green, or moist, ingredients. Composting expert Barbara Pleasant, in a "Mother Earth News" article, advises against making composting too complicated. Just pile it all together and keep it moist. An easy way to add moisture is to arrange a soaker hose in a figure 8 pattern on top of the pile. As decomposition proceeds, the microbial activity can build up heat to 150 degrees Fahrenheit inside the compost pile. You can speed up decomposition in a compost pile by manually turning the pile over, getting usable compost in about three to six months rather than in two years for unturned piles.


A wide variety of materials can go into a compost pile. It's helpful if you don't put thick layers of any one ingredient on the pile at once. Instead, put thin layers of diverse ingredients or just a wide variety in one layer. Egg shells can be crumbled and added to compost for a calcium source. The average American eats 250 eggs per year, or 76.5 billion eggs per year in the U.S., making egg shells a commonly available component for composting. Some ingredients you may not think of to add to the compost pile are tea leaves and tea bags, wet old newspapers, used litter from small rodent pets like gerbils and hamsters, and human and animal hair.

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