Lazy Composting

Gardening should neither be difficult nor expensive. If it is then you're doing it wrong (or maybe it's too big).

However, there are lots of companies and websites that will try to convince you that you need stuff that will make gardening both expensive and difficult.

For instance, the big plastic barrel supposedly for composting pictured below.

This thing is useless. It's actually standing where you should be composting, directly into the soil below it. If I had bought one of these I suspect that it would be sitting, unused and decaying, taking up valuable real estate.

For awhile, before I moved to really lazy composting, I did the routine where you have to turn the pile and monitor your compost, add this or that, move this or that. Yeesh--what a waste of time.

I suspect many people have stopped composting simply because the 'experts' have chimed in on how difficult and important it is. Meh. Don't listen.

Here's how we do it:

Just bury your organic material directly in the ground. The worms will eat everything. Your soil will become rich and awesome over the course of a few years.

The hardest part of my composting style is the very first time you do it because it will require digging two holes, one to put the compost from your kitchen into today and the other to put tomorrow's compost into tomorrow. Each time you compost after that you use the dirt from the hole you're digging for the next day to cover the compost you're currently burying.

Dig the holes in succession, in a line, in your garden and over time you will directly compost your entire garden. I have dug holes where I previously composted only months earlier and found nothing but the usual suspects, egg shells (no I don't grind them or do anything to them but bury them), onions and rinds. A year later even all of these are completely gone.

For years I have composted everything organic, and i mean everything--paper napkins, meat, onions, citrus rinds--directly into the garden. I have nothing to show for it but lots of worm poop. And, you know, we love worm poop.

As far as varmints digging up your compost. I use an electric fence and it is one of the best investments in technology I've ever made. But a dog would work, too, as long as you can keep it from the garden.