TONI Salter grows vegetables using the compost she creates in her Camden backyard, and believes composting is something everybody should be doing.
“It makes you consider just how much you consume,” Ms Salter said.
“It’s better for me, for you, and the environment.”
Also known as The Veggie Lady, Ms Salter is set to be a part of this year’s International Composting Awareness Week (ICAW), kicking off in Sydney on May 5, where she will host a question and answer panel on composting and worm farming.
Ms Salter encourages everybody to start a composting site, regardless of the space they have available, though she focuses on the urban crowd.
Even on a small scale, composting was a cheap and efficient way to reduce waste, she said.
“It’s surprising how much you can do in such a small area,” she said.
“My backyard is only 700 square metres, a normal suburban sized lot.
“Even on balcony apartments, I try to encourage people to do likewise.”
Ms Salter keeps four chickens of various breeds, a vegetable patch and a small orchard of fruit trees in her backyard.
“I use the manure from the chickens and veggie scraps to put toward the compost,” she said.
Good quality compost, she said, went hand in hand with organic gardening.
“It’s a matter of mixing wet and dry products and building up the microbial activity so the composting process works effectively,” she said.
“For productive gardens, organic techniques and organic fertilisers are used instead of synthetic fertilisers.
“By using organic fertilisers, it’s like a different form of nutrients for plants.”
Ms Salter said she achieved good solid plant growth, with resistance to pests and diseases, using organic fertilisers.
“Synthetic fertilisers are a quick fix of instant energy – an artificial burst of energy causing rapid and soft growth, leaving them susceptible to disease,” she said.
“You want good sustainable growth, which you get with organic fertilisers.”
Ms Salter is also a registered horticulturist and horticultural therapy consultant.
“I’m part of a council sustainability program, which extends to community areas,” she said.
“So that might mean therapeutic gardening in the community for rehab patients, the disabled, or people in a mental health facility.”
The Centre for Organic Research and Education (CORE) has launched International Composting Awareness Week (ICAW), to be held May 5 to 11 in Sydney.
The event is to encourage publicity and awareness of the importance of compost.
ICAW aims to encourage everybody, from the environment industry to small communities, to place value on organic waste and use composting in all areas.
Click here to visit the ICAW website.
More than just scraps and clippings
CREATING the perfect compost system can be hard to achieve, but Toni Salter has worked out the secret to success and is happy to share it with anybody who is willing to listen.
As a horticulturist, Ms Salter, Camden, knows the perks of being able to create a great compost system from basic items in the yard.
“I use the wood shavings and droppings from the chicken coop and mix it with my lawn clippings and vegetable scraps to create a rich, biologically active, nutrient dense compost for the garden and veggie patch,” Ms Salter said.
Ms Salter said although vegetable scraps and grass clippings are both good contributors to a compost heap, there are more nutrients needed to function properly.
“Another element for good composting is to combine herbs like comfrey, because they are great mineral accumulators and add extra fertility to the compost and also help speed up the process,” she said.
After getting the ingredients right, Ms Salter said the trick is to make sure the compost heap is aerated.
“The compost needs to be aerobic – the more microbes there are, the more things will break down quicker.
“The larger amount of compost you have the hotter it gets, as the microbes break down the material in terms of energy or heat.”