With my garden plans this spring I’m making an effort to compost our food scraps as much as possible. I keep a little ceramic bowl in the kitchen that I fill up and dump back out in our big barrel outside.

Composting has several benefits, all of which I’m enjoying.

• less garbage to toss out
• happy plants in my garden
• sweet hippie cred

My DIY composting system is pretty simple, and cheap. I bought the ceramic bowl for a dollar at a thrift shop and found the barrel that someone tossed out free. When I’m ready to get a second one there’s a local man selling several for only $6 each. That’s certainly much cheaper than the fancy bins I found at Lowe’s for $70. And it’s less likely to get complaints from neighbors than a heap in the backyard would.

My compost barrel consists of all the organic garbage from my yard and kitchen. This includes leaves, grass, leftover food that won’t be eaten, or newspaper (no more than a fifth of your pile should consist of newspaper, due to it having a harder time composting with the rest of the materials). I expect my barrel to fill up within several weeks. Then I can start getting it to compost.

After I get a large assortment of materials in my compost bin, I need to moisten the whole thing. This encourages the process of composting. The experts also say to chop every piece in the barrel into the smallest pieces possible. As the materials start to compress and decompose I need to frequently head outside and aerate the barrel. If you have a heap or open bin you can use a shovel to mix it all up, or an aeration tool to poke dozens of tiny holes into it. With my barrel I simple need to spin the barrel over several times (there’s a great video on spinning a compost barrel here). Doing this will increase the oxygen flow to each part of the pile, and oxygen is required for any decomposition to take place.

Let it compost down and Voila! All the stuff I would have thrown away becomes top grade fertilizer for my garden.