Composting Bread Makes Your Garden Grow!
It’s gardening season — time to pick out your favorite flowers, annuals, and perennials! We invest a lot of time and care into our gardens so they can bloom in beautiful colors all summer long and into fall. What better way to care for our petaled beauties than with a rich soil chock full of nutrients that will keep them fertilized and healthy for months.
Even if you have an established “green thumb” or are just a beginner gardener, one thing is for sure, soil from a compost pile provides the healthiest starting point for planting beds. A compost pile can be simple or elaborate, but either approach is a great way to re-purpose scraps of food into healthy soil.
Sunbeam Bread is fortified with nutrients for a wholesome goodness for people of all ages. But if your loaf of Sunbeam Bread has gone begun to go stale, don’t throw out those treasured slices. Did you know that you can put stale breadcrumbs in a backyard compost pile to add valuable nutrients for your garden? Another reason for composting bread is that — unlike certain types of food waste such as dairy products — bread will not imbalance the mix of your compost pile or slow down the composting process.
Bread is organic. It will decompose quickly and can be a resourceful source of nitrogen to your compost pile. Once exposed to moisture, it will practically fall apart on contact, especially when it’s already in small pieces. However, as with any scraps of food, it can attract pests such as insects and rodents to your compost pile. Luckily, there are some measures that can be taken to prevent these pests from engaging with your compost.
To successfully compost bread:
Break it up into smaller pieces. This will help the bread decompose faster as well as prevent pests from invading the pile.
Compost bread in an enclosed bin or a compost bin with a lid. This will help keep the pests from finding their way to the food scraps.
If your compost bin is open, place the bread in the center of the compost pile. This is where most of the heat is being generated and will help speed up the decomposition. It also prevents it from being found by the pests easily.
Make sure that the pieces of bread are well covered or buried with other material inside the compost bin to help prevent animals from picking up the scent.
Cover up the bread with materials like dry leaves or sawdust that are high in carbon. This will cover the bread from pests and will also balance the nitrogen and carbon organic matter in the compost pile, making the process more efficient.
Keep the pile aerated by introducing enough oxygen.
By composting bread, you have successfully kept 30% of food waste out of the landfill! Plus, in not time you will have a rich source of soil that will make your flowers and plants Sunbeam happy!