Warmer days will be upon us soon, and everybody’s excitement to get back into the garden is growing! The good thing about winter is it gives time and space to plan your gardening activities for the incoming seasons. What will you grow? What do you want to achieve with your back yard? What strategies will you use?
For an ever-growing number of gardeners, home composting is a big part of their plans. If you’re yet to give it a crack or are completely new to the idea of home composting, we’re going to give you a bit of information to help you on your way. You’ll be a compost guru in no time at all!
What is Home Composting?
Composting is a means of decomposing organic waste, where it biologically degrades and forms the humus-like material called compost. This is a highly nutritious organic fertiliser that is great for the soil in your garden and helps grow healthy, thriving plants.
This creates a circular food economy right in your backyard. You take your food waste, use it to create compost, use the compost to fertilise your vegetables, eat the vegetables and use the food waste to create more compost!
What Do You Need to Start Composting?
There are a couple of ways you can go about home composting. Traditional composting is basically creating a mound of organic waste in your garden, called a compost pile. You could also use a compost bin for this method, which is a standalone container that you add the organic material to.
You add ‘greens’ (fresh waste such as food scraps or cut grass) with carbon ‘browns’ (dried leaves or paper) in alternate layers and apply water. The breakdown process begins, and over the course of a few months of tending and turning, you start to harvest compost.
Guess what? There’s an easier and more efficient way. Say hello to ‘underground composting’!
With underground composting, your food waste gets placed underground in order to go through the decomposition process. (No big pile of decaying food in the corner of my garden? Yes please!) When underground, worms and microbes work together to break down the food waste into compost. This is called ‘vermicomposting’.
Subpod is an underground composting system that sits semi-submerged beneath the soil, with its lid exposed. The lid is opened and food waste is placed in for the hungry worms to go to work on! It looks pretty stylish in any garden and the lid even doubles up as a garden seat!
Subpod is a beginner-friendly means of getting into home composting. It’s easy to set up, and once your composting is ticking over its smell-free and pest free, unlike the traditional method. Plus, with our growing range of accessories like the Modbed, you can start composting no matter the size of your outdoor space!
Why Get Started with Home Composting?
We could wax lyrical about the joys and benefits of home composting for hours, but we’ll just focus on the main points here.
Compost and Your Plants
Firstly, compost and your plants are pretty much in love with each other. Compost is an organic, natural fertiliser that gives your plants what they need to grow healthy and strong. Some people reckon you can even taste the difference in your vegetables!
By providing the right set of nutrients for your plants, they have the resilience and strength to repel pests and diseases. Compost also attracts insects that are beneficial to your garden, like ladybirds and praying mantises. On top of that, it helps maintain the correct water levels in the soil, and keeps the pH at a nice steady keel.
Compost and the Environment
While you’re showing your garden all that compost love, you’re also doing great things for the planet. Home composting keeps your food waste out of landfill, where it would produce the harmful greenhouse gas methane as it decomposes.
With the ability to compost up to 15 kgs a week in a Subpod Classic, your household is doing their part in the fight against climate change!
Compost and Your Family
Home composting can definitely be a team sport that your whole family can enjoy, particularly if you use a Subpod. Kids love the worms, and really get a kick out of feeding them each day. It doesn’t take long, and it's a good opportunity to bond over something with positive outcomes.
There’s a big educational opportunity here too. Home composting will teach your kids about gardening, the food cycle and the importance of healthy eating. They will learn about environmental sustainability and how we all have to play our part in the fight against food waste and climate change.
Get Home Composting Today!
You’ve seen what the benefits are, now start enjoying them for yourself! Getting started on your home composting journey is as easy as figuring out which is the best Subpod for your space. To do that, use our handy buyers guide.
Once your Subpod arrives, assembly is a breeze. Once you make your worms at home, you can start filling it with organic waste in no time at all! We have an amazing community of enthusiasts and experts over at GrowHub who would love to help guide you. Sign up and hit them with all your composting questions!
In the meantime, why not read about the Ten Commandments of Vermicomposting, or learn about the five easiest herbs you can start growing at home!
See you out in the garden!
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