Get kids into composting

Kids can benefit from learning about composting; read below to get started teaching them how.

So where to begin? The banana peels, veggies they leave on their plate at dinner, and egg shells from breakfast are a perfect place to start! Have them help you pull the peels into strips and crush the egg shells. Everyone's old enough to help in some form or another, and kids will feel proud of themselves knowing they're an integral part of the soil-building process.

It's most effective to directly involve them in the process by showing them where the composter is located and asking them to put the scraps in the pile or bin themselves. Explain to them the process that's at work in terms they can understand, depending on their age. For a toddler, it might be sufficient to say that when we put veggie peels in the composter and worms turn it into dirt for the garden. However, nine-12-year-olds and older are perfectly primed to look up exactly how and why worms do so, and delve more deeply into the biological process at hand when waste materials are decomposed into soil.

How this mostly unseen, but powerful and necessary, microorganism builds and maintains soil is a fascinating subject that today's scientists are just now beginning to understand, and you're poised to put kids way ahead of the game. They'll be perfectly primed to ace biology classes and always have ideas for their science project. This way, you'll know that the knowledge will ripple outwards to classmates and friends, generation to generation.

Giving kids the gift of composting empowers them to grow up knowing how to produce food for themselves and have a science-based understanding of how food production works. Because they'll understand how food is produced early on, they're poised to grow more abundant gardens as adults.