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Composting to Enhance Home, Garden & Personal Health

If you are already or are interested in leading a natural lifestyle, composting is the perfect addition to your routine. You see, composting is not just reserved for the Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating minded anymore. Composting has been a natural progression in the waste-treatment and healthy-living realms. The reason? Once you get started, you’ll feel good from the inside out. And you can take solace knowing you’re doing something that is good for your home, your body, and the world that sustains us.

Environmental Health

Saved energy almost always translates into more money in your pocketbook and less pollution in the environment. It’s a win-win. But despite being an obvious lifestyle choice, many overlook energy-saving solutions such as residential composting. Need some extra motivation? You’re likely to see your energy-savings come to fruition in your water bills, reported an Energy.Gov article. Sending the food down the garbage disposal calls for more waste-processing in water plants, contributing to higher overall water bills. By eliminating the amount of food that goes down the disposal or into the trash bin, you already have a head start. Less processing in water and waste plants also helps utilize fewer waste-treatment resources that otherwise pollute the environment.

Home Health

Healthy soil is a fundamental element in a healthy garden. Without this foundation, it doesn’t matter how much effort you put forward. What many don’t know is that healthy soil starts below the surface. Composting is a simple way to put depleted nutrients back into the lower layers of the soil, which later trickle to the equally important top layers of soil. Healthy soil, through and through, all depends on a healthy food web. And a healthy food web is more easily attained through nutrient-rich organic matter found in compost.

Plus, once you have a stronger food web, you can save even more money on watering your garden. Better soil requires less watering. “All in all, EPA data shows that soil can retain 16,000 more gallons of water per acre for every 1 percent of organic material,” reported Earth911. As such, you’re bound to save the big bucks on watering your garden.

Human Health

Producing food from your own garden is one of the easiest ways to enhance your overall health. By eliminating pesticides and other harmful treatment agents from your garden, you’re already off to a healthy start. And composting only makes your produce better. “In addition to a thriving soil food web, the organic matter found in compost introduces vital nutrients to your garden, including macronutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium and micronutrients such as manganese, copper, iron and zinc,” explains Earth 911. Having these new nutrients in your garden allows for easier production of healthier, better-quality food that fuels our bodies.

Composting Creates a Healthier You

When the food and environment that surround us are healthier, our health falls into place with ease. With an array of indoor and outdoor composting systems available for year-round use, there’s no excuse to not get started. You have everything to gain and water usage, pollution, and utility expenses to lose. If you’re considering new avenues to improve your health, make it composting.

A Home Gardener’s Guide to Fall Soil Prep

In last week’s blog, we talked about the importance of healthy soil. Having established soil as a key factor in a healthier self, we’d like to follow-up with some tips.

It’s not even Labor Day and we’re already talking fall soil prep. You can’t get started too early, though. Many people don’t realize that fall is about much more than cozy, over-sized sweaters, comfort food, and colorful leaves patterning the streets. These are some of our favorite things about fall, but if you are somebody who grumbles about the cooler weather to come, we’ve got good news for you. Fall should be a celebration of new life to come.

Yes, we lose a lot of our greenery due to photosynthesis each autumn. However, fall is the opportune time to nourish your soil, restoring depleted nutrients after a long, hot summer. Just as you change your wardrobe, from summer to fall, we’ve got some tips to give your soil the much-needed makeover it deserves.

Soil Prep To-dos

Apply Soil Amendments

In preparation for fall, the soil is treated in order to prepare the soil with macro- and micro-elements necessary for plant vegetation. If you have a home garden, the leaves after harvest can be cut and left on the bed, before being plowed and mixed together with compost material and soil amendments like probiotic-based SCD All Seasons Bokashi™ and SCD Bio Ag® solution for the next planting.

Tip: Soil amendments reap the best results when applied before any soil-loosening methods occur. And as such, it helps the newly plowed soil receive an immediate food source, thus helping the soon-to-be replenished microorganisms flourish.

Loosen Soil

Working hard to support your lawn and garden through hot temperatures all summer long is a tireless job that often depletes soil of its vital nutrients. The second step of fall soil prep should be loosening the layer of topsoil. Over-plowing or tilling your garden can have negative effects. However, light plowing or tilling —preferably by hand— with a healthy compost mix can safely help restore the existing microbial ecology by delivering more nutrient-rich organic matter to the top layer and deeper soil. Aeration is a natural affect of soil-loosening, which allows soil and the microbes within it to breathe. In the long run, healthier the top and lower soil layers promote root growth, making for better results.

By taking these preemptive measures, you can transition into spring gardening with ease. Although soil prep may not seem overly important, remember that healthier soil makes for healthier crops, which contributes to a healthier you.

Healthy Soil, Healthier You

We spend a lot of time talking about human health, but we don’t want to overlook the other key components of maintaining an all around healthy lifestyle. Today, we’re giving a shout-out to soil.

2015 was declared the International Year of Soil. We encourage to treat every year this way, though. As you will learn in the below infographic, soil is one of the key ingredients that sustains life on Earth.