Compost to Save Our Bay




Our nation’s largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay, is threatened due to nutrient over-enrichment. How we better manage our home lawn and yard waste provides us with an opportunity to “Save the Bay”. Composting is one simple way we can help improve our water quality and allow aquatic life to flourish. Compost can directly lessen the loss of sediment. Both nutrient management and storm water runoff controls can be achieved by a well managed and placed compost pile.

If we wish to reduce nutrients by 40 percent yard owners can preserve our Bay for future generations. Million of sources of contamination or non point pollution jeopardizes our quality of life. Just leaving your clippings on your home lawns makes a big difference and provides your yard nutrients and moisture. Citizens who compost their yard and food not only recycle new earth not lessens the need to use more fertilizer. Test your soil out. Also we lessen more airborne nitrogen by not having to truck this valuable organic material to be disposed. Composting can easily save our region in millions of dollars of environmental costs. Everyone who has a yard can make a difference preserving our Chesapeake Bay by wise nutrient and storm water runoff management.

We are all interconnected when it comes to saving our earth. Composting helps also lessen soil loss. Erosion is the leading pollution source to our waterways. An average of nearly 17 tons of soil lost per acre of cropland per year. Just 2 billion tons of topsoil lost through erosion every year

Just a few hundred of years ago our land had hundreds of inches of topsoil. Today we barely have a few inches.

We must promote is both home, local, and regional composting that can lessen erosion and amend our soil. With accelerated building, construction and road development, we must stimulate the market for recycled humus and "buy compost". Not only will composting keep our area more beautiful it can transform our waste into new resources. Let’s lead the way as did George Washington who was our nation’s first composter. Celebrate compost week and make yourself some new humus!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The PRO Zone

I was just at the US Open as their guest. My mentor, Pauline Betz Addie, was inducted in their Court of Champions, winning four times in the 1940s.  In walking around several mindless cell phone users nearly collided with me. When I realize I am mindless, I celebrate the gift of the now, also called the present. Playing tennis has been a form of meditation for me. I call  the “PRO Zone " The acronym PRO- Pause, Relax and Open helps my game — arriving fully to play tennis. By relaxing in the present, I allow the distracting “mental” weather systems to pass. This allows me to greet each new point. Increasing my concentration, I give my fullest intention to pay attention.  When I “pause” between points and slow down-- becoming more responsive and less reactive increases my concentration during play. Next, getting myself to “relax” and focusing on mentally showing up can both lessen my errors and my anxiety  My introduction to mindful tennis first began when I asked my f...
Read more

Green Spaces Provide Great Economic Potential

This is a guest column thanks to Jack Lundee - "Taking a more progressive green approach." Some of the more heavily discussed topics of early 2010 include obesity, green infrastructure, clean water, and more. In particular, the addition and/or substitution of green spaces have been quite controversial as of late. Senior resident of Urban Land Institute Ed T. McMahon states "Green space adds value to property." Not only would these areas of conservation drive economic trends upward, but they also improve the overall health of the surrounding community. For example, substituting things like golf courses with conservation areas would essentially increase surrounding property value while diminishing overpriced maintenance fees. The same holds true for airports and other large acre-eating developments. Some of these areas are already abandoned or unkempt. For instance, park and recreational areas that were once highly visited have become urban wastelands. In an articl...
Read more

Celebrate Starshine

The shortest day is upon us. This is an opportunity to celebrate the most startime.  I embrace this starlight to light my inner candle. Dance under the Milky Way, allowing the trillions of lights filtering into the trillions of cells within you.   We are all children of the stars! It is a quantum pool of loving kindness. 93% of the mass in our body is stardust originating from giant red stars by the Big Bang 5 billion years ago. We share 97% of the same atoms. All the basic elements of life, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, calcium, and iron, were created before the earth. We share from these red giant stars more of this stardust than the asteroids or the planet Mars, All living and nonliving things on Earth, from water, crystals, rocks, stones,plants, animals, insects, birds, fish consists, of this stardust The First People are and were mystical stars watchers. These heavens are the homes of ancestors, animals, plants, and spirits.    Stargazing allows me to play with the ...
Read more