Tired of tumblers, piles and turning? Composting doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t require any infrastructure. It’s a simple, natural recycling method. If you hate rules and ratios… this post is for you.

Easy composting only has two steps.

Ready? Let’s compost!

An avocado skin? Great. Moldy baked beans? Wonderful. Old bills and non-glossy junk mail? Sure. Eggshells, tea bags, cardboard, citrus peels? Yep. It makes sense to keep a small trash can with a tight lid in my kitchen. Anything compostable goes in there. But kitchen scraps aren’t everything: there’s a pile of ways you can grab more materials to compost. For instance, when you’re pruning trees or dealing with fallen oak limbs in the yard, don’t drag them to the side of the road for disposal or burn them in a pile.

If you have a picnic in the yard with the children, use uncoated paper plates. Then save them… along with whatever uneaten food the toddler leaves behind. If you feel like working a little harder to gather organic matter, you’ll find opportunities everywhere. When you have a potluck dinner at church, help clean up at the end and throw all the napkins and food scraps into one container you can then take home. Check with your local coffee shop and see if you can pick up grounds from them. See if you can get boxes of expired produce from your local grocery store or farm stand. Gather cardboard from alleyways.

Ask your local feed store if you can sweep up the straw and alfalfa that falls to the ground from their bales. (I’ve gathered a lot of material this way.) Ask your neighbors to dump their yard waste at your place. Collect shredded documents from work. Pick up bags of leaves by the side of the road in fall. Ask local tree companies if they’ll drop their fresh-chipped “waste” in your yard.

If you want maximum fertility on your little piece of the earth, collect everything organic you can find. All the time. And then, my anarchist friend, move on to step 2.

Once a week or more, take your kitchen-scrap trash can to a place that needs fertility, then dump it. Do the same with your yard waste, dragging it to wherever the soil looks a bit sad and throwing it on the ground.

What’s this look like in practice?

Well, fruit trees and shrubs need fertilizing, right? Normally you’d give them a hit of chemical fertilizer now and again through the year. Instead of doing that, just drop organic matter on the ground around them. Pretend the tree’s root zone is a big, rough compost pile. Chop up some sticks, throw down some paper plates, spatter rotten salad greens, throw some spoiled fruit… it’s easy and fun. You can also put hunks of logs near the bases of your trees and along the edge of pathways and gardens to act as bunkers for fungi and other beneficial organisms…

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