I try to compost all plant and vegetable waste from the yard and the kitchen, everything. in fact, except meat (or fat) and bones - which have to be buried or they will smell foul.
Our compost container, a pail from Lee Valley Tools, sits covered on our kitchen counter.
When we first moved into our house with a yard, I read up on composting. I wanted to grow a natural garden, recycling all I could back into the soil. I read that you really need to have 3 compost heaps beside each other, each in a screened bin about a meter wide. As the dead plants or vegetable peelings decompose, they are moved from one pile to the next. The first pile is for stuff that is new, the second is partly decomposed (large unrecognizable pieces) and the third is for crumbly soil-like compost that you can take out and use.
This method is fine for professional gardeners or for people who love to work in the garden, watering and turning their compost a lot, so that it will decompose more quickly. (Actually all compost should be watered a lot or it may become a haven for wasps nests or squirrels... But keeping it damp will deter critters from making a home in this cozy pile.)
I prefer a simpler composting method. I have several different piles for composting throughout our yard - a large one in my back yard where I put a large amount of plant cuttings and dead leaves in the fall. It usually takes a few years for this to turn into compost. When it does, I dig it into the soil or spread it around garden plants as a fertilizer.
But I also have a few smaller compost piles in open plastic compost containers nearer the house so I don't have to go far to put my kitchen scraps into them. When they're ready to use in the garden, I don't have to take them far either.
I just moved this small container beside the fence, near where I have a partially decomposed heap from a year ago.
When these containers are full, I top them up with dirt and take away the plastic container - which I then move to a new location and begin again. Eventually these little mounds of dirt and compost turn into rich soil - which I then haul away with a wheelbarrow into my garden. I compost summer and winter. In winter the snow covers the compost heap - and I never throw peelings in the garbage.
Composting doesn't need to be complicated. My method - of having several small compost piles throughout the yard - works well for me. But the easiest system I ever encountered was at the home of friends in Montreal who had a small yard surrounded by flower beds and bushes.
Don't you compost? I asked John, when I didn't see a compost heap anywhere.
Of course, I do, John replied.
Then where do you keep your compost pile? I asked
Oh, I don't have a pile - I just dig a little hole behind one of the bushes. When it gets full, I cover it with soil and dig another. I never have to move the compost - it just turns into garden fertilizer where it is.
His method reminded me of how my father fertilized his hazelnut tree in our backyard on De Hart Avenue in Kelowna, BC. An avid fisherman, my father would clean the fish he caught outside on the picnic table, as he prepared to cook the fish. But instead of putting the scraps into the garbage, he would dig a hole beside the tree and bury them there.
The tree, on its part, rewarded him with bountiful harvests of nuts year after year!
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