International Compost Awareness Week

May 6, 2012

International Compost Awareness Week begins today!

(source unknown)

I only became aware of this on the ICAW Facebook page yesterday when I read that:

“across the United States U.K., Australia, and Canada, composting advocates will be encouraging everyone to use Compost! Those who believe in the Compost Message will be planning events in their community to promote the value of compost. All types of composting events — from “do it yourself” composting in your backyard to large-scale community-wide composting — can be promoted during the week.”

Lovely bins courtesy of www.organiccentre.ie

We may be a little late to get into the action this year but we could all do our bit by starting a compost heap or encouraging friends and neighbours to begin building one if they’re not currently doing so.

Local council environmental offices can point you in the direction of subsidised compost bins and are always delighted to help groups or communities with talks on composting, or you can make your own out of pallets. I wrote a post about The Stop Food Waste Campaign a while back where we were told we could save up to €1,000 a year by composting our kitchen scraps and not sending them off to the overfull landfill sites.

Compost: From this ……………………………………….to this

Home composting is one of the easiest and cheapest way of providing organic matter to your gardens – you can add anything from uncooked food, hair, newspaper and cardboard to grass clippings, wood ash and non meat-eating animal bedding (hamsters, rabbits etc). The trick is to get the mix right, just like baking a cake. Layering “browns” or carbon ingredients such as straw, newspaper etc with “greens” or nitrogen ingredients like grass, plant matter and vegetable scraps. I wont go on about the detail now however. Over on the articles page on the website there’s a free downloadable pdf HERE explaining the best way to compost.

So what do you reckon – are you composting yet or as it’s International Compost Awareness Week will this be the year you start?