With spring here all we’re thinking about is gardening, and when we think gardening, we think, you guessed it, about compost. Now, compost is a super cool way to improve your soil when it comes to growing things and it’s a great way for you to give your “garbage” a new purpose. As it turns out, we didn’t know very much about composting so we went in search of cool facts, and that is precisely what we got. Let’s get started!
There were a handful of presidents that we’re known for being pretty passionate about compositing. One happened to be our founding father, Mr. George Washington. He, in fact, gave up on harvesting tobacco altogether after learning it ruined the fertility of the land. Thomas Jefferson was an avid composter and soil rotator, and James Madison spoke often about the importance of adding manure or vegetable matter to soil.
Here’s a weird one, you can actually be turned into compost after you die. The company known as Recompose can turn your body into usable in just 30 days, and while you’ll contribute a great deal to the Earth, you won’t exactly, uh, know. Ya know?
Compost tends to run warm and on a hot summer day, your compost pile has the capability to spontaneously combust. This is a super rare occasion, but it can happen. So if you notice that it’s supposed to be a super hot day or that your compost pile is emitting some pretty extreme warmth, you may want to dampen and/or turn it.
If you’ve ever been hiking or camping way out in the sticks, then you’ve probably used a compost bathroom. While they aren’t as luxurious as an indoor bathroom, they really are quite beneficial to compost thanks to one particular component: urine. Urine is great for compost because it helps prevent the accumulation of sodium and it balances out a number of other nutrients found in compost.
Remember when we said that compost runs warm? It can, in fact, reach 75 degrees in just a matter of a few days. This isn’t necessarily a good thing because the heat can destroy beneficial bacteria. But science has yet to agree on what is considered the perfect temperature for compost. That being said, if you live in a cooler climate, you can successfully grow plants that tend to love heat in compost. You can thank the Ancient Romans and Victorians for that one!