Easy, New Ways to Make Compost for Your Garden

If you're throwing your kitchen scraps into the garbage and buying compost and fertilizer for your garden, you're wasting money. Those egg shells, banana peels and smushy tomatoes can become a crumbly, brown, nutrient-rich material for growing tasty veggies and beautiful flowers. Author Michelle Balz explains the process and tells gardeners how to think outside the traditional bin in Composting for a New Generation: Latest Techniques for the Bin and Beyond (Cool Springs Press).

You don't have to limit yourself to kitchen scraps when you're making compost. Balz says those leaves you rake in the fall can become black-gold, and so can grass clippings, extra plants you've pulled, small sticks and even weeds without seeds. (Weed seeds would sprout in your compost.) Think wood chips, sawdust, cornstalks and corn husks, dead flowers and shredded newspapers, too.

Vermicomposting, or composting with worms, is a great way to teach kids about gardening. To get started, make some holes for air and drainage in a box or bin. Next, add some red wiggler worms (Eisenia fetida), sold at bait shops and online. As the worms eat food scraps in the bin, they'll excrete castings you can use to amend your soil and fertilize your plants.

Don't bag your fallen leaves and send them to the landfill. Dump them into a wire bin instead and let them decompose. This DIY bin is 3' tall and 4' in diameter. Once the leaves settle, you can pack in more, and Balz says the bin can eventually hold about as many leaves as you'd stuff in nine paper bags. The resulting compost is called leaf mold, and while it's not as nutrient-rich as regular compost, it's still a valuable soil amendment.