Waste not
Not composting yet? Experts say composting could be the single most important thing you can do for the planet. Composting food waste not only diverts your food scraps away from landfill, where it would otherwise be releasing methane gas into the atmosphere and liquid leachate into creeks and streams, but it also creates healthy soil for growing food teeming with nutrients and connects you back to the Earth.
As we’ll see, composting and worm farming are all about health and a lot easier than you’d think.
LIVING SOIL
Peter Rutherford is the senior ecologist at Kimbriki Eco House and Garden (ecohouseandgarden.com. au), a sustainability learning centre in Sydney. According to Rutherford, who has been running workshops on composting, worm farming and organic vegie gardening for 18 years, “The soil is a living creature; everything comes from it. A knowing of ourselves can be deepened through this incredible life in the healthy soil and there are billions of microscopic organisms in every handful. I feel it — something deeper is happening when I interact with soil.”
That’s a statement based on more than just instinct: research published in the journal Neuroscience in 2007 on this process indicates that microbes in the soil can actually make you happy. “Mycobacterium vaccae [from soil] has been shown to boost the levels of serotonin in humans,” Rutherford explains. “We breathe them in when we hold, dig or simply smell the living soil.”
The ecologist encourages children to host Costa Georgiadis (), who describes soil as the most life-giving element we have; it’s what keeps us alive.
